Sebastien Roy wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 17:48 +0100, Darren Reed wrote:
>> I think that's going to an extreme...
>> But if networking things start providing front ends to stuff in SMF,
>> the equivalent to "editting a text file" might be "running svccfg" to
>> directly manipulate the property rather than use a front end?
>
> In the example you gave with VNIC configuration, wasn't the solution to
> run "dladm show-vnic -P" to discover that you in fact had a VNIC
> persistently configured (explaining why you couldn't create it again),
> followed by "dladm delete-vnic <vnic>" to delete that VNIC?
None of those suggestions were proferred..
"dladm show-vnic" (with or without -P) failed to display it.
But "dladm delete-vnic vnic0" did work...
I didn't want to have to do that - at least I didn't expect
to need to do it...
Doing "cat /etc/dladm/datalink.conf" did, however, display it.
mmm, those old fashioned administrative interfaces :-)
And now I see the "bug" (I turned on my brain, sorry.)
If you do "dladm create-vnic -l e1000g0 vnic0" but replace
your e1000g0 with another NIC (that then becomes e1000g0),
the MAC address changes and the entry in datalink.conf no
longer matches what is in the system, so it does not create
the new vnic0.
So while vnic0 follows the card around if you change slots,
when you actually replace it, you get unexpected behaviour...
While people might not do this normally with hardware, when
you're running Solaris inside a virtual environment (such as
VirtualBox), adding and removing NICs is a lot less of a
hassle... and typically you get a random MAC address each
time you add a new NIC...
So to tie all this together...
If I've got a NIC I want to replace that has a vnic, I can either...
1) edit /etc/dladm/datalink.conf and update the vnic entry with
the new MAC address[#], shutdown, replace NIC and boot..
or
2) shutdown, replace the NIC, boot single user, use dladm to
delete the vnic, use dladm to recreate the vnic and reboot
again so that I can verify the system starts up correctly
For the virtualbox/vmware case, there may be no option but (2)
because the software may not allow you to know the MAC address
until you've added it to the host - if you just stick to their
GUI. If you looked into their .conf files, you may be able to
record and reapply the MAC address from what was there previously.
But that's using methods to which are just as bad as editting the
datalink.conf file directly, so they shouldn't be relied upon.
I think there's room for improvement here... but as for the
temporary vs persistent thing... in this case, it seems likely
that I want to change the persistent store only (the MAC address
in datalink.conf or ...) and leave the running configuration
alone (maybe I've ssh'd in over the NIC that I want to replace.)
There's at least a man page bug because the documentation for
create-vnic in dladm(1m) doesn't mention that the vnic is tied
to the MAC address of the NIC. The impression that you get is
that by saying "-l e1000g0", you the vnic you are creating to
the thing with the *name* e1000g0. Maybe we need the equivalent
of "soft" vs "hard" links with vnic's and interface names?
e.g. a "soft link" with dladm ties a vnic to the named interface
(c.f. "ln -s foo bar" but a "hard link" with dladm ties it to
the MAC address (like "ln foo bar" does with inodes.)
Darren
# - unlike software based NICs, cards usually have the MAC
address printed on them somewhere, so you know what MAC
address it will have before you plug it in...
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