IP Network Multipathing Administration Guide

Recovering a Physical Interface That Was Not Present at System Boot

You must do the following manual steps before recovering a physical interface that was not present at system boot. The following procedure uses physical interfaces hme0 and hme1 as example interfaces. The procedure assumes that both interfaces are in a multipathing group and that hme0 was not present at system boot.

How to Recover a Physical Interface That Was Not Present at System Boot

  1. Retrieve the failed network information from the console log failure error message.

    See the syslogd(3C) man page. The error message might be similar to the following message:


    moving addresses from failed IPv4 interfaces:hme1 (moved to hme0)

    The error message might also be similar to the following message:


    moving addresses from failed IPv4 interfaces:hme1 (couldn't move, no alternative interface)
  2. Attach the physical interface to the system.

    Refer to the cfgadm(1M) man page, Sun Enterprise 10000, 6x00, 5x00, 4x00 or 3x00 Dynamic Reconfiguration User's Guide for a description of how to replace the physical interface.

  3. Refer to the message content from step 1. If the addresses could not be moved, go to step 5. If the addresses were moved, do step 4.

  4. Unplumb the logical interfaces configured as part of the failover process by doing the following substeps.

    1. Look at the contents of the file /etc/hostname.<moved_from_interface> to see what logical interfaces were configured as part of the failover process.

    2. Unplumb each failover IP address by typing the following command:


      # ifconfig moved_to_interface removeif moved_ip_address
      

      Note –

      Failover addresses are those addresses marked with the failover parameter, or those addresses not marked with the -failover parameter. You do not need to unplumb IP addresses marked -failover.


      For example, assume that the contents of the /etc/hostname.hme0 file contained the following lines:


      inet 1.2.3.4 -failover up group one
      addif 1.2.3.5 failover up
      addif 1.2.3.6 failover up

      Then, to unplumb each failover IP address, you would type the following commands:


      # ifconfig hme0 removeif 1.2.3.5
      # ifconfig hme0 removeif 1.2.3.6
  5. Reconfigure the IPv4 information for the replaced physical interface by typing the following command for each interface that was removed.


    # ifconfig removed_from_NIC <parameters>

    By using the example in step 4, you would enter the following commands:


    # ifconfig hme1 inet plumb
    # ifconfig hme1 inet 1.2.3.4 -failover up group one
    # ifconfig hme1 addif 1.2.3.5 failover up
    # ifconfig hme1 addif 1.2.3.6 failover up