Solaris basics: configuring the DHCP client

Having covered how to manually configure ethernet interfaces in Solaris, I’ll now go over configuring the DHCP client. Solaris comes bundled with both a DHCP client and server, but here we just want to configure the client to go out and configure a Solaris ethernet interface.

Instead of a hostname.<interface> file, you need to create two empty files – dhcp.<interface> and hostname.<interface>, in the /etc/directory

bash-3.2$ touch /etc/dhcp.e1000g0
bash-3.2$ touch /etc/hostname.e1000g0

Reboot for the changes to take effect.

NOTE: you can have either DHCP or a static IP address – so double check which files are in place under /etc and what their contents are.

DHCP can be checked with the following commands:

bash-3.2$ /usr/sbin/ifconfig e1000g0 dhcp status

And you can release the DHCP lease with:

bash-3.2$ /usr/sbin/ifconfig e1000g0 dhcp release

DHCP from within VMWare will allocate a default router and DNS settings automatically to your Solaris VM. To enable this to work properly, both /etc/defaultrouter and /etc/resolv.conf must be present, but empty.

If these files already exist, just delete them:

bash-3.2$ rm /etc/defaultrouter
bash-3.2$ rm /etc/resolv.conf

Then recreate them as empty files with the touch command:

bash-3.2$ touch /etc/defaultrouter
bash-3.2$ touch /etc/resolv.conf

Now reboot and note the new settings take effect.