Solaris

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 to access the 10.1.1.0 network to get to the default gateway and then to anywhere else.

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 opposed to e1000g4 even though e1000g4 is the one receiving the "echo request". This should not happen and these should be completely independent as they should all be advertising a 1 hop to that network

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.

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)

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.

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

Thanks DGPickett,

Yes, I myself was thinking of doing that but what's confusing is that this used to work fine before and there were no issues. Each interface was aware of its direct connection to the network and "minded their own business". All of a sudden, I've started to notice this bizarre behaviour. My only problem with configuring IPMP is what if the new virtual interface isn't recognized by this proprietary software that is running on it. This software is extremely inflexible and intolerant.

There are layers and layers: Solaris tip of the week: IPNAT load balancer (greetings from network.com)

Doesn't seem to help. This proprietary software comes with its own twist of the ipf/ipnat which overwrites any changes I make to the config file whenever I start the software. This has to be done at some routing level or some solaris config file level but I am still confused as to why, when this used to work and nothing on that level has changed. It should just use the interface that the data is being sent out of as that's the most direct path to the gateway.

So, then, what did you or somebody else change on the system?

That's the problem. You'd think that, but we didn't do anything special the last time we configured it because any networking theory will tell you that if you have NICs with an equal (or directly connected) metric to a network, they all have an equal priority by default and will try and access the network themselves. The only thing we did was change the IPs as we moved data centers and ISPs and now all of a sudden everything is going through e1000g0 and that's the only MAC the router sees regardless of them all being physically connected to the router. I think we need to run some protocol on this machine to advertise their metrics or something. Also, Like I said, when the machines reboot OR we restart the networking (with S72inetsvc) the router arp table sees all the MACs on their respective switchports, but then they disappear after a little while