network card driver problem

[Ricardo Correa]

Hi,

I am running HP-UX 10.20 on two hosts that back up each other.

When one has its lan interfaces up, the other one has its lan interfaces down,
and viceversa. Both with the same (set of) IP addresses.

So far so good, there is no conflict because only one interface with the same
IP address is up at a given time, right? ... well, not quite.

It occasionally happens that the driver btlan4 is monitoring the interface that
is down, and in a number of cases (i.e. the cable gets disconnected momentarily
or the device at the other end of the cable goes down) then btlan4 will
interpret that something may be wrong with the card itself, prints a message,
boots the card, and bingo, it comes UP instead of DOWN. Now we have two
interfaces (itself and the counterpart interface on the other host) both up and
both with the same IP address !!.

That creates havok on the network.

Does anyone out there know how to tell btlan4 NOT to be so intelligent and NOT
to boot/monitor the interface card ?

Failing that, does anyone know how to tell it to bring the interfaces
ifconfig'ed down by default?

Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Ricardo.
-------

[alberto vasquez]

in 10.20, i don't believe there is a way to tell a 100bt lan card to come up as s/w state DOWN by default. in 11.0, there is a variable in the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file.

one alternative is to create a startup script that does ifconfig's it DOWN.

one idea for two systems that use the same ip address is to cluster them together in MCServiceGuard. however, that is something you will have to decide according to your particular scenario.

Sincerely,
Rashmi Kadambi

[Jason Luginbuhl]

In /etc/rc.config/netconf where the interfaces are configured you should have the option of including the following parameter for each interface that is defined:

INTERFACE_STATE: Desired interface state at boot time. Either up or down, default is up.

This means that if the index number of 2 refers to a card that you wish to be configured but remain "down", then then entry in netconf should look like:

INTERFACE_STATE[2]="down"

If this parameter is omitted or set to "" then the default value of "up" is assigned.