SUMMARY: problems adding a second interface

From: Scott Ruffner <jpr9c_at_cs.virginia.edu>
Date: Tue Jun 12 2001 - 15:01:48 EDT
Well, responses were one of two possibilities:

1. Fix the hostname.hme0 file - this wasn't really relevant to the
original question, as the problem was that while the device was being
detected, it couldn't be plumbed.

2. "Manually" plumb the device - ifconfig plumb hmeX (where X is whatever
instance is detected).  This was what was failing, so repeating this
didn't do the trick - instead it generated an "invalid address" error
message, which I took to mean an invalid SBUS address (not IP).

In any case, the solution ultimately proved to have nothing to do with
"software" (OS configuration), but rather with the PROM itself.  Evidently
the PROM was not reporting a good address (SBUS presumeably) to the
kernel, so when the hme module was loaded, it wasn't able to handle the
instance of the new card.

The card was detected during boot with two different instance numbers:
/dev/hme1 and /dev/hme2 - /dev/hme0 was preserved for the on-board -
depending on which SBUS slot was used.

In the end, the solution was to update the PROM.  There was an update
available, and that had the effect of "resetting" or clearing the existing
PROM, and I believe that's what fixed it.  No similar bug was reported on
SunSolve that I could find.  I suspect that this means that if it were
possible to reset or clear the prom in some other way, you could
accomplish the same thing.  This was very reminiscent of PCI interrupt
conflicts when new hardware was added to early PCI systems (on PCs).

Thanks as always for the extra suggestions...one can never have too many
eyes.

Scott
==================================================================
Scott Ruffner
Computer Systems Senior Engineer       Computer Science Department
ruffner@cs.virginia.edu                     University of Virginia
(434)982-2219                    http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jpr9c
Received on Tue Jun 12 20:01:48 2001

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