About User Interfaces for Hot-Plug Operations

There are three different methods for performing PCI hot-plug operations on Sun Fire 880 systems:

• Push-button method

• Command-line method

• Graphical user interface (GUI) method

The push-button method relies on push buttons and status LEDs located near each PCI card slot. You can initiate a hot-plug operation by pressing the push button for the corresponding slot. Three status LEDs located near each slot indicate successful results or failure conditions.

The command-line method lets you perform hot-plug operations via a remote login session, a locally attached console, or an RSC console. This method involves the Solaris cfgadm(1M) command, and uses the LEDs near each slot to indicate where to insert or remove the affected card.

A graphical user interface for performing DR operations is provided through the Sun^TM Management Center system monitoring and management software (formerly known as Sun Enterprise SyMON^TM software). For more information, refer to the Sun Management Center Software User's Guide and the Sun Management Center Software Supplement for Workgroup Servers.

All three hot-plug methods use the status LEDs located near each PCI slot. These LEDs indicate when it is safe to insert or remove a card from its slot, and show whether the operation has succeeded or failed. For additional details on Sun Fire 880 hot-plug status LEDs, see "About Slot LEDs".

Regardless of the method you use, it is often necessary to perform additional administrative steps to prepare for a hot-plug removal operation. Prior to performing a removal operation, you must ensure that the devices residing on the card are not currently in use. To identify and manually terminate usage of such devices, you can use standard Solaris Operating Environment commands such as mount(1M), umount(1M), swap(1M), ifconfig(1M), and ps(1).

For detailed PCI hot-plug procedures, see Chapter 2, Using Dynamic Reconfiguration.