Lights out, nobody hme

Two days ago I rebooted my Sun servers, and they didn't appear on the network. So today, I went to Maplin, got some bits, built a RS232 RJ45 to D9 cable, and spent a few hours getting the laptop to talk to the LOM port on the netras.

When I got them, they were configured with hme0 to a fixed IP, so I named hme1 as the nodename, and configured DHCP. Later, I got a new ADSL modem/router and so had to redo the routing. At the same time, I set the nodename and named both ports after it. The DNS lookup didn't work so well with the new router, so I added all the local names to /etc/hosts. Apparently, as hme0 now had the nodename, which was in /etc/hosts, it grabbed that ip, and so became the primary ethernet port, whilst hme1 (which had the cable connected to it as it was the one I intended to be the main one) was taken down. So they vanished from the network.

After I'd spent 3 hours driving into town, building cables, finding minicom, finding what the serial ports are called on the laptop, setting up minicom and working out how to use netra LOM console, I discovered that if I'd tried switching the cables to the other network port I could have logged it right away.

But then I'm learning how to use Solaris, so it's all good, as I now can use LOM if I really need to.


TME