Getting Solaris network information

Troubleshooting networking issues in Solaris can be a pain. When compared to most any Linux distrobution, Solaris falls short on easy to use tools and resources. While the tools might not be easy to find, there are a number of tools that can be used to figure out the status of your various network devices. The first simple program that will help determine all the interfaces on your Solaris server is dladm. Dladm is a tool that is used to configure data-link interfaces. I am not going into the full use here, as it would not be beneficial in troubleshooting.  The second tool that can be used is ndd. Often you will not need to touch nddif you have used dladm correctly.

List all of the network devices on the server.

One of the first items of information that is needed when working on Solaris and looking at the network, is the name of the network devices (aka NIC or Network Interface Card). Unlike Linux, solaris does not use an alias to the device, and the names of the devices change depending upon which hardware you are running. The quick way to determine the names of all the interfaces on the server is to use dladm. Ifconfig does not work because if an interface is not plumbed then it will not be displayed.