Managing Multipathing | Solaris 9 Network Administrator Exam Cram 2 (Exam CX-310-044)

You can manage network interfaces that have been configured to use IPMP by using the command if_mpadm . There are only two options to this command:

-d ” To detach a network interface and place it in an offline state
-r ” To re-attach an interface that was previously offline or failed

Consider the scenario in the preceding section, where hme0 and hme1 were both configured to use IPMP.

If you detach the hme0 interface by using if_mpadm -d , which is currently using the IP address 192.168.28.28 , the failover mechanism can be seen to work. The output shown here includes the ifconfig -a command to enable you to view the status after the interface has been detached:

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 # if_mpadm -d hme0 Apr 14 13:05:22 ultra10 in.mpathd[4668]: Successfully failed over from NIC hme0 to NIC  hme1 #7 # ifconfig -a lo0: flags=1000849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 8232 index 1         inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000 hme0: flags=1000842<BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,NOFAILOVER,OFFLINE> mtu 1500 index 2         inet 0.0.0.0 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.28.255         groupname ultra         ether 8:0:20:b3:41:53 hme0:1: flags=9040843<BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,DEPRECATED,IPv4, NOFAILOVER,OFFLINE>  mtu 1500 index 2         inet 192.168.28.29 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.28.255 hme1: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 3         inet 192.168.28.30 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.28.255         groupname ultra         ether 8:0:20:b1:40:55 hme1:1: flags=9040843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,DEPRECATED,IPv4, NOFAILOVER> mtu  1500 index 3         inet 192.168.28.31 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.28.255 hme1:2: flags=9040843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> \  mtu 1500 index 3         inet 192.168.28.28 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.28.255

From the previous code, you can see that

The detached interface hme0 is now showing a status of OFFLINE in the flags= section.
The IP address for the detached hme0 has been set to 0.0.0.0 .
The IP address previously used by hme0 ( 192.168.28.28 ) has been assigned to a newly created logical interface on hme1 .
The logical interface hme1:2 is now taking the network traffic from the detached hme0 interface.
The hme0:1 logical interface remains configured, because in.mpathd needs to be able to continue to probe for repair detection and uses this test address for this purpose.

The following message will be displayed if no interfaces are available for the failover:

Offline failed as there is no other functional interface available in the multipathing group for failing over the network access .

When you re-attach a network interface, using the if_mpadm -r command, the configuration performs a failback to the original interface.