Aloha,
Hope you're having an enjoyable Friday and are looking forward to getting out of the office just as badly as I am. It's a long story, but I can't even begin to explain how close I came to just snapping like a twig and going incendiary on my cubicle, the office, the parking lot, the CostCo down the street and pretty much the entire business district. I swear; one more day of this and I might have ended up on the national news being brought down in a hail of bullets as entire Police departments and SWAT Teams on loan from neighboring states littered the urban landscape with speeding chunks of molten hot metal (killing the 100 or so odd "innocent" bystanders, of course). Thank God it's Friday. I never thought I'd ever say that and not feel like an imbecile, but, there you have it. I'm wasted. Worn out. Done. Through. The world has taken its sweet time this week and pummelled me like a crash-test dummy. One day at a time; that's what they say, right?
Hold the phone... I'm getting a late breaking news flash. It seems that today is actually Tuesday (??) Wait... no, it's Monday, definitely Monday (Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man, Judge Wapner, Jeopardy) and I'm writing Tuesday's copy. Okay... that, yes... that does mean that ...the work week has just begun... Man... that's... just... depressing... I... All right; buck up. Keep repeating: "I need this job. I need this job." Don't question authority, do what you're told, toe the line, don't buck the system, don't pass the buck, because the buck stops here. I guess I'll have to live up to the title of this post now... It appears I'm going to need Friday's paycheck. I can't possibly finance the kind of epic malfeasance I'm going to be burning to unleash, four days from now, on the change in my pocket and the fumes in my gas tank. So, hey :) Let's learn something we may already know :)
BTW (which means By The Way if you're too lazy to type the whole thing out, although the explanation kind of defeats the whole purpose... ;), the preceding two paragraphs were in jest. Seriously. I was only kidding, and I apologize to each and every one of you that came here for the few lines of actual cut-and-paste code and technical writing that follow. Of course, if you're a regular reader, you either enjoyed the above, hated it but couldn't stop reading (like not being able to look away from a car wreck, except, this is a just a bunch of words on a "page" and there aren't any cars involved ;) or just skipped right past it. If you're one of the last bunch, you're not even reading this right now, which means I could use this opportunity to make a few totally-uncalled-for remarks, but I won't. Just this once... On with the show :)
Today's we're going to take a look at using kstat on Solaris 10 ( It's actually available on Solaris 9, as well - I'm sure not sure, off the top of my head, about 8, but I think they were still using "netstat -k") to find out the three things you most often want to know about your network interface cards. Of course, the three things you'll want to be able to check on, arise from three separate problem-areas (which almost always get lumped together to some degree). Basically, you'd never need to know this stuff if your NIC's came, out-of-the-box, all cranking at the highest speed possible, transmitting as efficiently as possible and only engaging in worthwhile speed/transfer/protocol negotiations with upstream/downstream routers. But, hey, sometimes the world's not perfect ;)
1. How to check your NIC's link speed with kstat:
They say they sent you a Gig card, but you could swear it's chunking along at 100 meg. You're probably right (or really really really impatient ;), but it never hurts to know for sure (insofar as you can know anything for sure - BTW, be sure to check out my post-existential-emo-nihilist poetry at PleaseKillMeButDon'tMakeItHurt.com ;). This command line should give you that info (-m is the argument for your NIC driver type - might be ce or something else, and -i is for the instance of that driver. In this instance we're using the device driver bge0. -s is for the statistic you're looking up, if you want to specify that; which we do, for now):
host # kstat -m bge -i 0 -s link_speed|grep link_speed|awk '{print $2}'
1000
And, YES, according to the OS, that NIC (or that port, anyway) is performing to expectations. Running at a gig. Fantastic!
2. But, what about the duplex? This is a legitimate concern. I've actually never seen any card run at 1 gig half duplex, but it "is" possible, or they wouldn't account for it. You'll usually call duplex into question when you're running at 100 meg (on a gig-capable card and network) or 10 meg, given the same circumstances. This is easy to find out, too. Just hire a team of monkeys to hammer the keyboard until they come up with this sequence of characters ;)
host # kstat -m bge -i 0 -s link_duplex|grep link_duplex|awk '{print $2}'
2
Yet again, SUCCESS! If you wanted full duplex, anyway. That's what the 2 stands for. You could also end up with a 1 (half-duplex) or a 0 (which, technically, means your link is down. If you're not connected through serial console, ALOM, or something of that sort and you get this result, your version of kstat is either lying to you or it's hurt and confused ;)
3. And, finally, we should probably figure out if our NIC is set to auto-negotiate. This setting is less "definite" than the other two, since the folks who configure your network may require that your NIC be set to auto-negotiate, or (this happens a lot) train specifically to a determined speed and duplex. Auto-negotiation is always the easiest thing for both parties involved, if it works, but if you need to force your NIC to run at 100 meg full duplex and turn off auto-negotiation in order for your server to run on the network, that's that. You either do it or people start to wonder why they're paying you ;)
host # kstat -m bge -i 0 -s cap_autoneg|grep cap_autoneg|awk '{print $2}'
1
This is either great news or the beginning of a headache that could last weeks and drain you of whatever shattered will you have left ;) If you get a 1 back from this command, auto-negotiation is enabled (In a perfect world, you're Golden) and, if a 0 comes back, you're not doing any auto-negotiation.
If you want to change any of these values, check out this really old post we did on figuring out your NIC's speed and duplex on Solaris (to set the properties, just change the -get option for "ndd" to -set). It'll get you all sorted out :) And, yes, that post is somewhat similar to this one, but it's from November 2007 and we were still all hung up on using "netstat -k" to get our info back then ;)
Keep smiling. Even if it hurts ;)
Cheers,
, Mike
tbuskey noted this with regards to the kstat command and link speed attribute. Thanks!
This still depends on the hardware. EDITOR NOTE: For this card, tbuskey notes that ifspeed is what you should be looking for!
I have an nge card. kstat -m nge -i 0 | grep link
link_asmpause 0
link_autoneg 1
link_duplex 2
link_pause 0
link_state 1
link_up 1
link_duplex 2
link_state 1
$ kstat -m nge -i 0 | grep speed
bus_speed ifspeed 1000000000
ifspeed 1000000000
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