Help! Can't get network to work

Question

I have Solaris 10 installed and running smoothly.. except I can NOT get my NIC card working. I swear it's harder to configure networking on Solaris than anything i've ever delt with. I have a 3COM 3C450 PCI NIC card, how do I know if Solaris has the drivers for this card installed, how do I install them, and how do I configure my IP address? I'm definetly not a Unix newbe, I've worked with Irix and AIX for many years, but this is extremely frustrating.
Thanks

Answer 1

Hello
First step:
Check if the driver is running correctly. Type in "<b>/usr/sbin/prtconf</b>" or "<b>/usr/sbin/prtconf -v</b>".
This command prints information about all devices in the system and if the device is recognized by a driver or not (a message "Driver not attached" is shown if not). The "-v" variant shows more detailed information (you will get a huge number of lines).
Second step:
Find out the name of the network card (example: /dev/hme0). Unlike Linux the ethernet cards do not all have the name /dev/eth* but different types of cards have different names (/dev/le*, /dev/ce*, /dev/hme*, ...).
Third step:
Test the card once:
Type
<b>ifconfig <i>name</i> plumb</b>
<i>name</i> is the name of the network card without "/dev/"; example:
<b>ifconfig hme0 plumb</b>
The card is recognized as network card by the system. Then type:
<b>ifconfig <i>name</i> <i>IP_address</i> up</b>
Example:
<b>ifconfig hme0 12.34.56.78 up</b>
The card is assigned an IP address and started.
Fourth step:
Installing the card in the configuration files:
Add an IP address - host name pair for your computer in the /etc/hosts file.
Then type
<b>echo <i>my_host_name</i> > /etc/hostname.<i>cardname</i></b>
Example:
<b>echo mycomputer > /etc/hostname.hme0</b>
Then reboot the computer.
Using DHCP is a bit more complex.
Martin