[Sunhelp] Odd problem with Sun FastEthernet card

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Mark C. Langston wrote:

> The only oddness I had, besides some serious difficulty getting the 
> system to boot at all without doing some wacky debugging in /dev and
> /devices, was that instead of having le0 and be0, I how have le1 and
> be2.  I could also never get the be interface to connect at 100Mbps
> until the changeover, even though it's been connected to a 10/100
> autosensing switch.

When you move devices around Solaris will attempt to assign them different
device numbers.  It can't tell the difference between a card
removal/installation and a card move, so it does the safe thing and
assumes that someday the card in the old slot will come back to claim its
inheritance.  This should not be a problem.

Reinstall the OS if it is at all possible.  Moving boot disks between
different machines in the same karch is possible but you get strange
things cropping up like this.  I'm not sure if it is ipfilters fault or
not, but I'd do a reinstall in any event.  Running a be in 2.6 or above is
strange enough that you don't want to add any more complications.

> Has anyone ever seen anything similar to this?  Does anyone know
> if there's a plain second 10^T Ethernet SBus card for a Sparc 5?
> (I don't want a qfe, and the 501-1881 isn't for the 5.)

Sure it is:

Ethernet Controller
Sun-4/15/30/40/50/60/65/75   SS4 / SS5
Options 450 / 453            501-1881

Bottom line, almost any sbus card will work in any sbus based machine.
The exceptions are few and are generally confined to cards that do not
have driver software for sun4c or those that require specific PROM
revisions.  The X453 card even works in sbus Ultras, though it is not
supported.

-James