Solaris basics: configuring the DHCP client No comments yet

Having covered how to manually configure ethernet interfaces in Solaris, I’ll now go over configuring the DHCP client. Solaris comes bundled with both a DHCP client and server, but here we just want to configure the client to go out and configure a Solaris ethernet interface.

Instead of a hostname.<interface> file, you need to create two empty files – dhcp.<interface> and hostname.<interface>, in the /etc/directory

bash-3.2$ touch /etc/dhcp.e1000g0
bash-3.2$ touch /etc/hostname.e1000g0

Reboot for the changes to take effect.

NOTE: you can have either DHCP or a static IP address – so double check which files are in place under /etc and what their contents are.

DHCP can be checked with the following commands:

bash-3.2$ /usr/sbin/ifconfig e1000g0 dhcp status

And you can release the DHCP lease with:

bash-3.2$ /usr/sbin/ifconfig e1000g0 dhcp release

DHCP from within VMWare will allocate a default router and DNS settings automatically to your Solaris VM. To enable this to work properly, both /etc/defaultrouter and /etc/resolv.conf must be present, but empty.

If these files already exist, just delete them:

bash-3.2$ rm /etc/defaultrouter
bash-3.2$ rm /etc/resolv.conf

Then recreate them as empty files with the touch command:

bash-3.2$ touch /etc/defaultrouter
bash-3.2$ touch /etc/resolv.conf

Now reboot and note the new settings take effect.

Solaris basics: configuring ethernet interfaces No comments yet

Recently I’ve had several clients who’ve just started with Solaris, and who have had roughly similar questions. So I thought I’d put up a few “How To” posts covering some Solaris basics.

Each LAN interface in Solaris has a configuration file in /etc which is named after the interface name and it’s instance.

So, let’s assume that you have two e1000g interfaces configured – you’d have two configuration files:

/etc/hostname.e1000g0
/etc/hostname.e1000g1

These files will just contain a hostname, which maps to an entry in /etc/hosts.

An example from my OpenSolaris development workstation:

bash-3.2$ cat /etc/hostname.e1000g0
grond

And this is /etc/hosts:

# Internet host table
#
::1 grond grond.local localhost loghost
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.13.100	grond grond.local loghost

When Solaris boots, all it does to configure a LAN interface is look for hostname.* files in /etc. It then looks up the hostname in /etc/hosts to find out the IP address, then configures the interface.

So if you need to change the IP address of a LAN interface in Solaris, all you need to do is edit the hostname entry in /etc/hosts and reboot. For example, to change grond’s e1000g0 IP address to a different subnet, /etc/hosts would be modified to:

# Internet host table
#
::1 grond grond.local localhost loghost
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.125.100	grond grond.local loghost

Then reboot the host for the changes to take effect.