q1) how do i check remotely (over ssh) - how many physical network interfaces I really have ? -- if an interface exists before and it got plug out, it must not be show again.
-- i tried dladm show-link and ifconfig -a, but it seems to show a previously existed interface (that is not around anymore -- but i try this on a VM though...)
q2) is there anyway to check how many network cards physically exists and which interfaces are on the individual cards ?
q3) just curious, what does "plumb" really means ? why do we even need it ?
q4) what are the steps that should be done when i add a harddisk into the system ? how do i detect the harddisk without rebooting the system ?
is the steps below correct
a) devfsadm
b) format
c) mkfs
d) mount ?
q5) lastly, can i say that in SPARC system, each partition in a disk = slice while in X86 platform , each partition in a disk is a partition and slices exists INSIDE the partition
First of all, whenever you change something hardware wise, run the following:
There are several ways to force Solaris to scan and update it self for new hardware but this is the method I like the most.
Second, using the following command you can see all the Ethernet cards that are physically connected to the computer:
Third, before you can use the card you need to plumb it, basically it allows the OS to use it and assign an IP to it, once you do that you'll see it when you run ifconfig. You plumb an interface only once, the automatic plumbing job belongs to the file you create per interface:
You should tell what Solaris release you are using, administration tasks changed a lot with Solaris 11. For example creating a "/etc/hostname.e1000g0" file has no effect on Solaris 11.
SPARC systems do not use fdisk partitions so might call disk slices partitions.
x86 systems use fdisk partitions so try to avoid calling slices partitions.
Slices are indeed areas inside the Solaris fdisk partition on x86 while on SPARC, there is no intermediary layer.
EFI (GPT) changed all of that.
ZFS prefer to use whole disks so obsoleted the requirement for multiple partitions/slices.