There are a myriad of NIC chipsets in use by the major server vendors (Broadcom, Intel, NVidia, etc.), and each chipset typically contains a unique set of capabilities (e.g., hardware offload support, some amount of on board cache devoted to RX / TX rings, hardware flow classification, etc.). To see which capabilities a given NIC [...]
With the introduction of Nevada build 57, the Solaris IP stack was enhanced to support IP instances. IP instances allow you to create one or more unique TCP/IP stacks on a server, and each stack can be managed independently. What makes these extremely powerful is the ability to assign an IP instance to a zone [...]
While reading up on the Sitara project on opensolaris.org, I noticed that the project team is planning to add VRRP support to Solaris. They are also working on speeding up small packet forwarding performance, which will be great for sites that run busy DNS servers and voice solutions. Now if we can just get them [...]
I use Solaris IPMP (IP multipathing) on several of my servers to allow them to keep operating in the event that a network interface or switch were to fail. Periodically I need to take IPMP managed interfaces offline, but I need to keep the IP addresses attached to those interface up and operational. Solaris comes [...]
While reviewing some notes last night, I came across an entry in my notebook that described how to configure Solaris interfaces to support 802.1Q tagged queing. Given a physical interface named “ce0″ that will be associated with VLAN 500, the formula to create the interface would be: ce + (VLAN number * 1000 + instance [...]
While performing some testing a few weeks back, I needed to enable jumbo frames on one of our Fujitsu 250s. This was accomplished with the following three steps: 1. Add the following line to /etc/system: $ echo “set fjgi:fjgi_jumbo=1″ >> /etc/system 2. If the default 9000 byte MTU isn’t ideal, add the preferred MTU to [...]
