While preparing my presentation for the Atlanta UNIX users group this past weekend, I accidentally created a VNIC with the wrong name. Instead of removing it and recreating it, I decided to test out the “rename-link” subcommand that was introduced as part of project Clearview. The rename feature worked swimmingly, and with a single dladm command I was able to rename the vnic6 interface to vnic5:
$ dladm create-vnic -l e1000g0 vnic6
$ dladm rename-link vnic6 vnic5
$ dladm show-vnic
LINK OVER SPEED MACADDRESS MACADDRTYPE VID
vnic1 switch0 0 2:8:20:b:5f:1 random 0
vnic5 e1000g0 1000 2:8:20:56:3a:82 random 0
vnic3 switch0 0 2:8:20:23:6c:7e random 0
vnic4 switch1 0 2:8:20:90:d9:26 random 0
vnic2 switch1 0 2:8:20:ea:7:18 random 0
I am super impressed with the work that the Sun networking team has done to simplify network interface management!