Display Serial Number

To simply display the serial number run sneep with no arguements

# sneep
0011223344

To display the serial number and its associated tag in the EEPROM and infact all stored Tag/Value pairs.

# sneep -T
“ChassisSerialNumber”   “0011223344″

Store Information in EEPROM

To store information into the EEPROM like the asset tag use the “-t” to set the tag name and the “-s” option to set its value as below:

# sneep -t “AssetTag” -s 001234

To display all information

# sneep -T
“AssetTag”  “001234″
“ChassisSerialNumber”   “0011223344″

Install Sneep

Sneep is not installed by default in Solaris. Click here to download the latest version of Sneep utility. (requires a sunsolve account)

Install as follows from the directory where the sneep package (SUNWsneep) is downloaded to:

# uncompress SUNWsneep2.6.tar.Z
# tar -xvf SUNWsneep2.6.tar
# pkgadd -d . SUNWsneep

To confirm the installation

# pkginfo -l SUNWsneep
PKGINST:  SUNWsneep
NAME:  Serial Number in EEPROM
CATEGORY:  service
ARCH:  sparc,i386
VERSION:  2.6
BASEDIR:  /opt/SUNWsneep
VENDOR:  Sun Microsystems, Inc.
DESC:  Persistent, software-accesible storage of Chassis Serial Number (CSN) across OS and application changes. Works on all Sun platforms. Can also store and retrieve arbitrary other values in EEPROM.
PSTAMP:  cvs-sustain-build20080930010154
INSTDATE:  Jun 04 2009 17:22
HOTLINE:  Support provided through normal Sun support channels
EMAIL:  sneep-support@sun.com
STATUS:  completely installed
FILES:       25 installed pathnames
5 directories
3 executables
1315 blocks used (approx)

If you didn’t accept to create a link file in /usr/sbin during the pkgadd, add a symbolic link as follows;

# ln -s /opt/SUNWsneep/bin/sneep .

To check the man page

# man -M /opt/SUNWsneep/man  sneep

For command help

# sneep -h

Save and retrieve Chassis Serial Number  ( CSN ) using EEPROM.

usage:

sneep [-aFhlTvVx] [-t tag] [-s setting ] [-P ds1:ds2...] \
[-d default] [-o separator]
setcsn -c serialnumber
showplatform -p csn

-h              This help message
For detailed information, consult the man page. Try
man -M /opt/SUNWsneep/man  sneep

To confirm this behaviour

root@solarisserver# eeprom local-mac-address?
local-mac-address?=false

The output “local-mac-address?=false” indicates that the factory-default Mac-Address is not being used and a system-wide MAC-Address is used.

To make the NICs use their factory default MAC-Address set the “local-mac-address?” value to true.

root@solarisserver# eeprom local-mac-address?=true

This requires a reboot for the changes to take effect and hence reboot the server.

root@solarisserver# init 6

When the system comes back online, an “ifconfig -a” should show the NICs having individual MAC-Addresses. These are the factory default unique mac-addresses than the system-wide mac-addresses.

If however, if you find more than one interface still have same MAC-Address then it indicates that the NIC does not have a factory-default mac-address and hence will still use the system-wide mac-address.