Infrastructure Software

Hi,

I have been struggling for a couple of days with the following problem:

I am running Solaris 8 on an Intel networked machine. The NIC is D-Link DFE-530TX+, I had to download a beta driver for Solaris 8 from Realtek (this NIC uses a Reltek 8139 chipset). As far as I could see the driver installation went OK, I see the Ethernet interface with "ifconfig -a".

I am using a home network with a Linux gateway to a cable Internet connection. The problem is, however, that the gateway (or any other machine on the local network) is not visible from my new Solaris 8 box. When I try to ping other machines on the network, the Solaris 8 box first broadcasts an ARP request to resolve the IP address to a hardware address -- I verified that with "snoop" and could also see that the network switch was showing traffic to all nodes. It seems, however, that none of the other machines reply or that they reply but the Solaris box does not get the answer... I tried to "hardcode" the Ethernet hardware addresses of the other machines into ARP (as in "arp -s <host_name> <hardware_address>") -- the result was that the Solaris did not do the ARP broadcast before the ping (since it had the hardware address of the pinged box) but it also did not receive a reply to any of the ping requests (this time, the network switch showed traffic between the Solaris box and the pinged box only).

Exactly the same problem occurs when I try to ping the Solaris box from other boxes on the local network (first, no reply to the ARP broadcast, then, after hardcoding the Ethernet address, no reply to the ping request). It seems that the Solaris and the rest of the machines on the network do not speak the same language :)

I am really kind of stuck since I do not know if it is a problem with the beta driver for the D-Link DFE-530TX+ (unlikely) or something that I am doing wrong (likely). I considered using another NIC to test if I sould configure the machine fine but I decided to check if anyone can help me with an advice.

Any help or suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
st0yan@hotmail.com