Solving Network Issues at the PROM Level

As you may recall, in a previous post we looked at how to disable Sun network devices at the PROM level. In this post we're going to look at the the flipside, somewhat, of that coin.

This situation can occur quite frequently if you're building boxes on a network where the folks who run the switches and routers insist on "pinning" their ports to "100 full" or "1000 full" (speed - duplex) rather than allowing for auto-negotiation. While this is a simple problem to fix at the OS level (See previous post referred to above), it can become an issue when booting from the PROM.

And, yes, generally, even this issue is easily solved on a machine that's already set up. You can boot up in "100 half," bleeding packets by the truckload, and then set the correct parameters for the network device after logging on. However, if you're trying to install a machine over the net (using Jumpstart, for instance) the out-of-the-gate setting of "100 half" on your network device most likely won't sustain an initial connection to your Jumpstart server, much less an entire install.

Luckily, it is possible to set parameters for your network device at the PROM level. This has saved me more than a few times. There's nothing less enjoyable (unless you're just looking for some "quiet alone time" ;) than having to switch CD's at the console of machine after machine after machine, during an initial server build-out.

Setting up your network interfaces, to comply with the pinned network ports, is also very easy to do. It's so simple, I was surprised the first time I learned how to do it. Like most things with the PROM, exact spelling (characters alpha and numeric) is the difference between success and failure, so it's good to keep this info in your head (or in a crib-sheet). In another previous post we discussed the "sifting" command, which, unfortunately, won't help you much here since the main command we're looking for is "boot." Everything that makes this work is an option to that command.

You can set two properties for the "boot" PROM command that will make all the difference in the world. You can set the "speed" and you can set the "duplex." Oddly enough, those are almost always the exact two things that are giving you a headache ;) So, if you need to connect to your network at "100 full," instead of "boot net - install," you could type in the following:

boot net:speed=100,duplex=full - install <--- Substitute speed and duplex values to your liking.

It's as simple as that. Now you can boot from the PROM and know that your connection is going to be forced to the same speed and duplex that the network admins have pinned the ports to. In a future post, we'll go into how to determine if the "net" devalias isn't pointing to the proper network device in PROM, which devices are active and how to get around that issue.

Barring any other problems, your network install (or just network boot) should now work perfectly :)

, Mike

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