Chapter 1 Introduction

This introduction briefly describes where network administration usually fits into ChorusOS system administration.

This guide provides only a brief description network administration in the context of the ChorusOS 4.0 product.

On ChorusOS systems, many network administration tasks are performed during system initialization. In order to better understand how you can intialize and configure a ChorusOS system, it helps to start with a clear view of how network initialization fits into overall system initialization.

In essence, the ChorusOS boot process involves loading the system image, initializing kernel structures and finally starting all boot actors. At the end of the boot process, network structures are not yet initialized.

Initializing network structures is the task of the C_INIT(1M) boot actor. It is not necessary at this point that you know the details of what C_INIT does during system initialization, but you do need to know that the C_INIT actor loads a special system initialization resource file, sysadm.ini(4CC), and executes the commands it contains sequentially.

Thus, sysadm.ini should contain all commands needed to set up networking on the ChorusOS target system. The rest of this document focuses on the commands related to networking setup and on the networking capabilities such commands enable.

Basically, sysadm.ini allows you to:

• Create network devices and network interfaces

• Execute network adminstration commands to configure network devices and network interfaces

• Start network administration daemons to manage network interfaces.