SUMMARY: Solaris 8 /dev/hme driver woes

 Hi. After banging my head against a wall all day - but finally solving
a mildly hairy problem, I thought I'd share it with the list.

Problem:
 Installing the latest Recommended and Security patch cluster on a
Sun Ultra/30 running just-installed Solaris 8 broke /dev/hme. The
installed driver for the NIC was:
SUNWhmd        SunSwift SBus Adapter Drivers

 Patch id 108981-06, included in the cluster, apparently fixes some
minor driver issues.

 After installing the patch cluster and rebooting, I lost hme0 from
ifconfig, and was unable to plumb it again:

# ifconfig hme0 inet plumb up
ifconfig: plumb: hme0: Bad file number

 Running ndd didn't help either:

# ndd /dev/hme0
couldn't push module 'hme0', No such device or address


 After some fruitless attempts rebooting and reinstalling patch
108981-06, I finally solved the problem as follows:

Solution:
 Install the following packages from the Solaris 8 CD *before* applying
the patch:
SUNWhmd        SunSwift SBus Adapter Drivers
SUNWhmdu       SunSwift SBus Adapter Headers
SUNWhmdx       SunSwift SBus Adapter Drivers (64-bit)

 I suspect that SUNWhmdu is not strictly necessary, but at this point I'm
*not* risking any further downtime to check.

 After installing those packages, applying said patch and rebooting, all
was well. Hope this helps some poor soul in the future.

--
Vangelis Haniotakis - Network & Communications Centre, University of Crete