I have read your post#1 countless times and I must confess that I am at a loss to understand your question. Sorry about that I cannot give you a specific answer as a result.

So what I will do is bash some keys a provide some general network interface information as it pertains to Solaris 9. I apologize if you already know all this but we have to start somewhere. This might be a long post before I'm finished, I don't know, it's just going to be as it comes (into my head).

Why are you seemingly just plumbing missing IP addresses that you can't ping onto another system? With IPMP the same IP address is aggregated across two or more NICs (on the same machine).

If you want to configure IPMP you would do that BEFORE you 'plumb'. For example if you have interfaces bge0 and bge1, you would create an aggregate interface 'aggr1' for example and after that you would plumb and configure only aggr1. You would not try to configure bge0 and bge1 individually any more.

Now Solaris 9 will look for files /etc/hostname.<interface> at boot time and try to plumb those interfaces. If this system was restored from a different hardware platform, then you might for example have a file /etc/hostname.ce0 existing causing Solaris to try to plumb ce0 at boot-time when ce0 doesn't actually exist on this hardware. To stop Solaris from trying to plumb ce0 simply delete the /etc/hostname.ceo file.

When Solaris finds a file /etc/hostname.<interface> at boot-time, it reads the hostname from this file and then (assuming the interface is not configured for DHCP of course) goes to /etc/hosts and looks up the IP address it should use on this interface.

If you aggregate bge0 and bge1 into aggr1, then a file /etc/hostname.aggr1 is created which Solaris will try to plumb at boot-time.

Now, you are trying to get a FAIL message for ce0 to disappear, yes? I can think of only two possibilities why a system would complain about ce0 FAIL:

1. File /etc/hostname.ce0 exists but actual interface ce0 does not exist on this hardware. Delete the file.
2. The interface ce0 does not exist on this platform but is included in an aggregate IPMP configuration that has been restored from a different hardware platform. Down the aggregate interface and delete the IPMP configuration, then recreate the aggregate with interfaces that do exist on this platform and exclude ce0 which doesn't.

Aggregating interfaces has nothing to do with other systems on the LAN. Provided the network cables from the aggregated interfaces go to network switch(es) that understand multi-pathing then all should be well.

I'm going to stop there. If I've completely misunderstood your question then please give us a clue what this is about please.

Hope that helps in some way.