AIX

Hi,

I've got a IBM RS6000 with AIX 4.43 running with several networkcards. During a system restore somehow one of the networkcards doesn't connect.

I've been trying to troubleshoot the problem but I have no idea where to start. Am I right that the ENT# devices are the physicle NIC's? What are EN# or ET#

Could someone give me some basics about this kind of troubleshooting?

Thanks in advance!
Robbert

AIX 4.43? do you mean 4.3.3? (oslevel)

If a card was added after AIX was installed then when you restore the cards may be discovered and configured in another order, so the ent that used to be entx is now enty and the ent that used to be enty will now be entx.

Yes, the ent device is the physical adapter and the en and et devices are the available interfaces that are available on the adapter.

You can only configure one en interface OR one et interface per ent device.

I've never met a system that uses the et interface, always use only the en interface.

The et interface is some old, never used, ethernet standard.

HTH.

"ent-n", "et-n" and "en-n" are different aspects of the interface: "ent" is the physical device as you have already thought. It is the device entry for an Ethernet NIC card, like "hdisk-x" is a disk device, "scsi" is a SCSI-Adapter, etc.

"et" and "en" are logical devices which come from different driver layers. The former one is the (logical) ethernet-interface (to put it in network terminology: its the layer-2-device). Note that the et-device has already a MAC address (because this is a layer-2-addressing device). You can (could - better not change these values unless you know exactly what you are doing) configure datagram packet sizes and the like.

The en-device is a full-blown IP interface with an IP-address and everything else necessary for IP networking.

This is mostly for your information because usually you will not have to manage the lower layers of the driver stack. AIX does - usually - a fairly good job in administering these. For everything else see dukessds excellent advice.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Hi,

Thanks for your reply!

Yes I did mean OS 4.3.3, sorry about that!

are the ENT# and EN# always matching? ie EN16 belongs to ENT16?

I have found out that EN15 is configured as EN16. (EN15 has the IP adress and default gateway which should belong to EN16) Can this affect the system? I cannot connect to the network adress.

What can I do to change the numbers?

Thanks in advance,
Robbert