Increasing Boot Process Suspension Time

Using DHCP to configure an interface may increase the boot time. In particular, if no DHCP server is present to answer the client's requests, a delay of approximately 30 seconds occurs for each interface. If you want your Solaris DHCP client to suspend the booting process until the network interface is configured (regardless of how long this takes), edit the network interface's DHCP enable file (/etc/dhcp.interface_name) and add the phrase wait forever.

If you want your client to suspend its booting process for a shorter period of time, you can specify the number of seconds to wait instead of using the keyword forever. For example, if you want to allow DHCP one hour to configure the network interface before the booting process continues, specify wait 3600.

Even if the suspend time is exhausted, the Solaris DHCP client will continue asynchronously to configure the network interface until it is successful. To avoid this, you can specify the drop option to the ifconfig(1M) command. For example: ifconfig le0 dhcp drop. This will remove the specified interface (in this case, le0) from the control of the DHCP agent, which should cause the asynchronous address allocation attempts to terminate.