David Dean, dave.dean@gmail.com, 21 July 2006
Intel NICs are popular, cheap, and generally 'good enough'. You probably already have ten in a box somewhere, and if you're going to install Solaris on a desktop machine (or even an old non-Sun server), you'll want to make sure the card comes up.
I have cached the most recent drivers at the time of writing: ife-0.8.8.tar.gz
If you want to check for a more up-to-date driver, visit the Free NIC Drivers for Solaris site, and scroll down to the 'ife' driver.
Now you've got the driver, you'll need to put it on some media that your Solaris box can read - CD or floppy, up to you.
Copy the driver somewhere safe to unpack and work with the files. Then unpack everything, like so:
# gunzip -cd ife-x.x.x.tar.gz | tar xf -
Firstly, remove the 'standard' iprb driver, and reboot.
# rem_drv iprb # init 6
Move into the 'ife-x.x.x' directory, and do the following.
# /usr/ccs/bin/make install # ./adddrv.sh # devfsadm -i ife
Create '/etc/hostname.ifeN' where N is the number of your ife device (so it's probably '0').
Then reboot ..
# init 6
And your Intel NIC should be happy from there on out. Remember to 'ifconfig ifeN up' if you're having problems.
TBA