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Make Unsupported Network Cards Work with Solaris

Introduction

I recently faced an issue with network card recognition for my home server. I have two D-Link DGE-530T gigabit network cards, and unfortunately, they don't work out of the box with Solaris. No need to panic though - as the drivers exist under BSD license, they have been ported and some even packaged.

This was my case for these DLINK cards. I'll share the approach I followed to get my two cards working, and I'll provide reference links in case you have other network cards that need to be recognized.

Installation

First, let's remove the old package containing the drivers:

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pkgrm SK98sol

Next, we'll check if there are any driver aliases and then remove them if they exist:

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grep sk98 /etc/driver_aliases

Remove all the lines that appear from this command.

Now, let's proceed with installing the driver. Download the version corresponding to your architecture of the D-Link driver, then decompress and install the package:

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gtar -xzvf skge*.tar.Z
pkgadd -d . SKGEsol

Follow the instructions. At the end, update the list so that updated aliases are created:

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update_drv -a -i "pci1186,4b01" skge

Finally, we need to make the hardware detected at boot:

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touch /reconfigure

All that's left is to reboot the machine and you're good to go :-)

FAQ

I have problems with VirtualBox recognizing my card, why?

In the VirtualBox logs, you might find something like:

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vboxflt:vboxNetFltSolarisOpenStream Failed to open '/dev/skge0' rc=19 pszName='skge0'

And that's the problem - in /dev/, there's only skge and not skge0 as indicated in /etc/hostname.skge0.

Unfortunately, I didn't find a quick solution. I preferred to change the network card instead. Sorry for those who were hoping to find a solution to this problem.

References