Solaris / ESX – Networking Issues

Networking connectivity Issue / Dropping packets

Ok, so I finally installed Solaris 10 32bit, but then found that the network interface keep dropping packets (??)
To fix this I installed VMware tools which installs a new vmxnet driver but as a result this also renames your interface to vmxnet0. 

Installing VMware tools has affected your machine being able to plumb pcn0

Due to this when you reboot your get networking errors and also the system telling you it

                 cannot plumb pcn0

In order to resolve this you will need to rename the interface which you can do via the following command (in this example the interface i am changing is pcn0),

mv /etc/hostname.pcn0 /etc/hostname.vmxnet0 ; perl -pi -e ‘s/pcn0/vmxnet0/g’ /etc/hosts

Once complete run the ifconfig commands to plumb the device (vmxnet0) and also bring the interface up.

More information on configuring Solaris interfaces can be found here.

Rick Donato

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