It Must Be Time for Tea

Tuesday November 09, 2004

driver_aliases Magic

I just learned a trick for use with /etc/driver_aliases that I wanted to share.

Last Friday I did a net install of Solaris 10 on an internal test system. It's some sort of x86 box; I don't have access to the lab to verify the type. When I rebooted after the net install, the system wasn't recognizing its network. ``ifconfig -a'' would only list lo0. I would have suspected that the NIC wasn't plugged in, except I had just installed it over the network.

Alan DuBoff explained to me that a likely cause of the problem was that the card was not listed in /etc/driver_aliases. The fix procedure was pretty simple:

1. do ``prtconf -pv'' and look for a line for the NIC that appears to contain a driver_aliases entry. In this case it was

   model: 'PCI: 14e4,1645.1028.121.15 - Broadcom 5701 Gigabit Ethernet'

2. Add a corresponding line to /etc/driver_aliases. In this case:

   bge "pci14e4,1645.1028.121"

3. Reboot.