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Phase 0 is the name we are giving to productizing our prototype as an interim fix while we do the implementation of the larger project. This is being done under the aegis of PSARC case 2007/136. Details about how to use this functionality are below.

Availability

We putback into build 62 of Nevada (a.k.a. SunOS 5.11, sometimes called Solaris 11).

Caveats

  • Enabling/Disabling NWAM: NWAM is implemented as an alternate instance of svc:/network/physical. To enable NWAM, first disable the default instance, svc:/network/physical:default, and then enable the NWAM instance, svc:/network/physical:nwam, using the svcadm(1M) command. Refer to the nwamd man page for more details

    Be cautious when enabling/disabling instance of network/physical, however. Your network configuration may change as a result; in particular, you may get a different IP address, which can wreak havoc with existing TCP connections, including NFS mounts. It is safest to make this configuration change in single-user mode, before the network has been configured.

  • Automatic discovery of IP interfaces which may have become available as a result of a card insertion is not yet supported, but restarting the NWAM service (by invoking 'svcadm restart nwam') after such an insertion (or removal) will work around this limitation.

  • Incorrect security keys: If a security key for a wireless LAN is incorrectly specified, or if the key changes, there is no way for nwamd to detect if something is wrong - the wireless link will report itself to be connected even if a wrong key is used, but no traffic will flow, and DHCP will time out. To fix this, it is currently necessary to delete the incorrect key manually. To do this, as root, run 

        # dladm show-secobj
    and look for the object named nwam-<essid>-<bssid> or nwam-<essid>, where essid/bssid are the ESSID/BSSID of the problematic WLAN. These can be determined via 
        # dladm show-wifi -p
    Then run: 
        # dladm delete-secobj nwam-<essid>-<bssid>
    ...followed by 
        # svcadm restart nwam
    The security key should be prompted for again, giving an opportunity to enter the correct/changed key.

Changing Configuration Policy

By default, NWAM will implement a set of policy rules when configuring interfaces. It will configure one active interface at a time; it will select the one interface to configure based on availability (for wired interfaces, is the wire plugged in?) and preferring wired interfaces over wireless. Once an interface has been selected, NWAM will use DHCP to obtain an IP address and DNS server parameters for the interface. Only IPv4 will be enabled on the interface configured by NWAM.

If you wish to change any of these policy rules, you may do so by modifying the /etc/nwam/llp configuration file; details on the format of this file may be found here. Note that this file will be deprecated when more extensive user interfaces are available (with the delivery of NWAM Phase 1).

Driver Oddities

Wired
See our DL_NOTE_LINK_{UP,DOWN} page for details.
Wireless
  • The ath driver works well, though it had intermittent problems connecting via WEP until 6551525 was fixed in build 66.
  • The iwi driver works well, though it had a confusing auto-connect behavior until 6542321 was fixed in build 66.
  • The pcan driver works, though it did not report ESSIDs on SPARC until 6562579 was fixed in build 66.
  • Other drivers are less well tested.

Tunables

All of these are properties under the property group nwamd of the service instance svc:/network/physical:nwam.
Name Type Default Description
autoconf boolean true (62 & 63);
false (64 & later)		 Whether or not to connect automatically to the open WLAN with the best signal strength if no user can be queried or the user's choice cannot be connected to. Since this behavior was confusing some users and causing security worries for others, we disabled it starting in build 64.
debug boolean false Enables debug logging using daemon.debug
dhcp_wait_time count 60 How many seconds to wait to acquire a DHCP address. If this timer expires, an alternate IP interface will be selected and brought up; however, the attempt to acquire an address via DHCP will continue. If DHCP eventually succeeds, the alternate interface will be disabled and the preferred one restored.
popup_info boolean true Whether or not a pop-up message should be provided indicating that an IP address has been obtained and/or an IP interface has been brought up or down.
popup_query boolean true Whether or not a pop-up message should be used to query the user about which WLAN to connect to, WEP keys, etc.
scan_interval count 120 How many seconds between periodic wireless scans
use_net_svc boolean true Whether or not to use the start script for svc:/network/service:default to update /etc/resolv.conf after obtaining an IP address.

Help!

If you are having problems with NWAM, it may help to visit our troubleshooting guide.