Network Interface may not come up online at reboot in Solaris

Everytime you reboot your Sun Solaris Server, you may find that one or more of your Network Interfaces may not come online.

If you did a “netstat -r”

sunsolaris# netstat -r

Routing Table: IPv4
Destination           Gateway           Flags Ref   Use   Interface
——————– ——————– —– —– —— ———
BASE-ADDRESS.MCAST.NET solaris10            U         1      0 hme0
default              192.168.0.1          UG        1      0 hme0
localhost            localhost            UH        1     61 lo0

You may not find that the network for the Network interface not found in there (192.168.0.0 here) and as you would expect adding the netmask manually fixes the problem.

sunsolaris# ifconfig hme0 255.255.0.0

The problem with not being able to bring an interface up at a reboot indicates a problem with the /etc/hostname.interface file (here /etc/hostname.hme0). It could be with an extra line in your hostname.interface file (here hostname.hme0) that causes the problem with the interface.

To check if thats the problem,

sunsolaris# wc /etc/hostname.hme0
2 0 2 /etc/hostname.hme0

It should report as “1” line and not as “2” as above. To fix the problem from occuring again,, edit the hostname.interface file and delete the extra file.