Multiple primary interfaces on Solaris 8

[alleforums]

Hello,

I have a machine with Solaris 8, and it has multiple interfaces that are connected to the same network which means they all have metric 0 (1 hop) to the default gateway.

assume:
e1000g0 - 10.1.1.70
e1000g2 - 10.1.1.72
e1000g4 - 10.1.1.74
e1000g5 - 10.1.1.76
gateway - 10.1.1.65 (Cisco Router)

However, it seems like despite the fact that they have a direct connection, they seem to be using e1000g0 as their gateway interface to access the 10.1.1.0 network to get to the gateway and then to anywhere else.

This gets even more confusing when I go into the Cisco router and run the command: "show mac address-table" where only the MAC address of e1000g0 is shown for the switch port it's connected to, but not for the other interfaces which are connected to the switch. Yes, all ports are active (no shut) and are pingable.

The routing table inside the machine also looks good and clearly shows each interface itself being the gateway to the 10.1.1.0 network.

When I send a ping to say, 10.1.1.74 (IP of e1000g4) and capture packets on e1000g0, I see the "echo reply" messages going out of it as well as e1000g4. This should not happen and these should be completely independent.

How can I make sure that when the internal software of this machine specifically sends something out of interface e1000g4, it goes directly out of that interface to the 10.1.1.0 network, through the 10.1.1.65 gateway and out into the world?

I need to somehow assign all these interfaces equal priority and make them understand that they're physically connected to the 10.1.1.0 network and there's no need to go through e1000g0 to get to it.

This is causing a lot of problems as eventually all traffic will end up going through the e1000g0 interface and that will become a bottle neck.

Please help
Thanks in advance

 

[cndcadams]

check your local-mac-address setting with eeprom or from the ok prompt printenv. This needs to be set to true in order for the mac addresses to be different.If it is set to false it uses the prom mac address for all nics

 

[alleforums]

Hello,

thanks for the reply. I don't have this setting in my machine for some reason. When I do an eeprom | grep mac, it doesn't show anything...even examining all other settings, I don't see that setting.

Also, the odd thing is that ALL of these individual MACs show up in the router ARP table when the machine comes up, however after sending a ping to one of them, after a certain expiry or whatever period, the MACs disappear from the router ARP table and only the MAC for e1000g0 shows up. The arp table of the solaris machine however shows all the relevant MACs of each port of the router that it's physically connected to (This is actually a Cisco Switch with the advanced IP services imagine and L3 routing turned on)

Any other ideas? As a last ditch effort, I'm considering configuring IPMP on this machine bundling e1000g0 and e1000g4 and a second bundle with e1000g2 and e1000g5 and hopefully I can isolate specific traffic through one bundle and the other type fof traffic through the other bundle. So that even if my one type of traffic goes through 1 interface, I can at least have a HA solution in place. Calculating the amount of traffic the machine can handle, it appears that a 1Gbps port is enough to handle it without becoming a bottle neck but if one of the port fails, it can failover to the other interface and keep on humming. Comments?