Lost network - can't get it back.

[John R. Ulmer]

First, apologies.... I have inherited a couple of HPUX 11 boxes and come from a Linux/Perl programming back ground. So, I'm coming at this cold.

I have two HPUX 11 boxes that were running and happy. We lost our network and and DHCP server. Network came back up and we thought we had the DHCP server back up but actually did not. The HPUX machines would not get past the NFS startup step when booting. So, I booted to single user and commented out the NFS mounts in /etc/fstab and rebooted figuring that if I could get them to boot, I could straighten out the network tangle. No Joy. Then we determined that the DHCP server was, in fact down, and started it. The HPUX machines are still unhappy. When they boot, the sit for several minutes on 'Starting Native Adapter Agent', eventually get past it and never start the GUI login page (sits with console login). Can't ssh to them. From a console login, can't ping machines that I should be able to on our network.

Obviously, I need and am planning some formal training in the future. But, in the mean time, it appears that these two machines have a persistent network confusion.

How do I track this down?

Thanks.

PS - Posted this in the wrong area previously. Please forgive the cross posting.

[Rita C Workman]

It is possible if you major network issues that some configuration on the network switch ports took a hit, so the ports that HPUX boxes are in may not be configured right.

Get into the server in single user mode, which you know how to do.
Run lanscan to get the mac address of your lancards.
Run linkloop against the mac address:
linkloop 0x

You should get 'ok' response from the ports that are cabled, the rest will not (cause nothing there).
This is just to confirm the ports ok.
Now get the speed for your lan ports:
[man lanadmin]
lanadmin -s
lanadmin -x

The -s gets you the speed and -x gets you the option (like auto_neg ON or OFF/Manual]

With this information you can go and talk to the network guy (notice I didn't say guru) and ask him to check the switch ports to ensure that they are configured the same as your nic ports.

My guess is he didn't have his switch backed up and when things came up, he lost a good bit of the switch configuration!

Just a thought,
Rita

[Rita C Workman]

...oh...and make sure he knows what subnet your boxes are on.

Rgrds,
Rita

[John R. Ulmer]

That's just exactly the kind of step by step I need. Thanks a ton! I can sort through these issues on my Linux boxes pretty well, but, there is just enough different on the HPs to slow me down. You help is much appreciated.