The Treehouse Blog

I recently installed Solaris 9 x86 on some unused hardware I had laying around.  The installation went fairly smoothly, which was good, given that previous attempts at creating a Solaris 9 x86 virtual machine on a variety of virtualization products proved fruitless.  I was unable to get the NIC to work, however.  It is an e1000-based chip, but a desktop version.  After applying all available patches, I had essentially concluded that the driver just didn’t properly support the card.  The behaviour was bizarre – using DHCP, the server would record the typical progression of messages, but the system would never finish configuring the interface.  With manual IP configuration, I would be unable to ping to or from the system, but ARP tables would populate.  Very confusing.  It seemed as if the card was working, but traffic was being dropped or filtered somewhere.  Eventually while trying to find information on the Realtek driver support, assuming I had to use a different card, I found a post regarding switching the system from APIC to PIC solving the problem.  I made the change in the BIOS, and the network card now behaves perfectly well.  Just thought I’d mention, in case some other poor soul encounters the same issue.