Multipathing provides failure detection, repair detection, and load balancing of outbound traffic when data is flowing to more than one destination.
To run multipathing the system must have more than one interface, be running Solaris 8 10/00 or later, have a test address configured for each interface using multipathing, have each interface belong to the same multicast group and have a unique Ethernet address.
in.mpathd reads /etc/default/mpathd on startup. It carries out failure and repair detection by probing test addresses on each interface and by monitoring the internal IFF_RUNNING flag.
To configure hme0 with the multicast group ultra , edit the /etc/hostname.hme0 file:
ultra10 netmask + broadcast + group ultra up \ addif ultra10_mp deprecated netmask + broadcast + -failover up
Or use the command line:
# ifconfig hme0 group ultra # ifconfig hme0 addif ultra10_mp deprecated netmask + broadcast + \ -failover up
The deprecated and -failover options make it a test address.