Public Network Management (PNM)

Use the PNM to configure and administer network interface card monitoring and failover. However, the user interfaces to the PNM daemon and PNM administration commands are obsolete and will be removed in the next Sun Cluster feature release. Users are strongly discouraged from developing tools that rely on these interfaces. The following interfaces are officially supported in the current release, but are expected to be removed in the next Sun Cluster feature release.

• pnmd(1M)

• pnmconfig(4)

• pnmstat(1M)

• pnmset(1M)

• pnmrtop(1M)

• pnmptor(1M)

To prepare for the transition to IP Multipathing in the next Sun Cluster feature release, consider the following issues.

• With the integration of IP Multipathing in the next feature release, the Solaris IP Multipathing administration model and interfaces should be used for network availability management. See the Solaris IP Multipathing Administration Guide for more details.

• Solaris IP Multipathing requires that for IP Multipathing groups with more than one physical interface, each interface must have its own IP address to be used strictly by the IP Multipathing daemon for monitoring of its health. Therefore, before transitioning to IP Multipathing, you must prepare an additional IP address for each interface (active and backup) in a NAFO group. This is a requirement for multi-adapter NAFO groups, and a strong recommendation for single adapter groups.

  For example, assume nafo0 is on the 75 subnet, and it consists of qfe0 and qfe4. Suppose /etc/hostname.qfe0 contains the hostname schostname-1, which maps to an IP address on the 75 subnet. In order to transition to IP Multipathing in the future, two more IP addresses on the 75 subnet must be allocated, to be used for each of qfe0 and qfe4. See the Solaris IP Multipathing Administration Guide for more details.

• IP Multipathing requires that all interfaces in an IP Multipathing group must have distinct hardware (MAC) addresses; that is, setting the eeprom property local-mac-address? to true is honored. Interface cards that do not support this include:

  X1018A SunSwift SBus Adapter

  X1059A SunFastEthernet Adapter 2.0 SBus Card

  You must be prepared to replace these cards during the upgrade to the next feature release. While single-adapter IP Multipathing groups may function despite the lack of support for local-mac-address?=true, such configurations are not optimal for high availability setups. See the Solaris IP Multipathing Administration Guide for more details.