Technical data

SunOS 5.5 Devices le(7D)
Under either of these two conditions the host translates the lack of link pulses into a link
failure unless it is programmed to ignore link pulses. To program your system to ignore
link pulses (also known as disabling the linktest) do the following at the OpenBoot
PROM prompt:
<#0> ok setenv tpe-link-test? false
tpe-link-test? = false
The above command will work for SPARCstation-10, SPARCstation-20 and
SPARCclassic systems that come with built in twisted pair Ethernet ports. For other sys-
tems and for add-on boards with twisted pair Ethernet refer to the documentation that
came with the system or board for information on disabling the link test.
SPARCstation-10, SPARCstation-20 and SPARCclassic systems come with a choice of
built inAUI (using an adapter cable) and TPE ports. From Solaris 2.2 onward an auto-
selection scheme was implemented in the le driver that will switch betweenAUI and TPE
depending on which interface is active. Auto-selection uses the presence or absence of
the link test on the TPE interface as one indication of whether that interface is active. In
the special case where you wish to use TPE with the link-test disabled you should manu-
ally override auto-selection so that the system will use only the twisted pair port.
This override can be performed by definingthe cable-selection property in the
options.conf file to force the system to use TPE or AUI as appropriate. The example
below sets the cable selection to TPE.
example# cd /kernel/drv
example# echo ’cable-selection="tpe";’ >> options.conf
Note that the standard options.conf file contains important information; the only change
to the file should be the addition of the cable-selection property. Be careful to type this line
exactly as shown above, ensuring that you append to the existingfile, and include the ter-
minating semi-colon. Alternatively you can use a text editor to append the line
cable-selection="tpe";
to the end of the file.
Please refer to the SPARCstation 10 Twisted-Pair Ethernet Link Test (801-2481-10), Twisted-
Pair Ethernet Link Test (801-6184-10) and the driver.conf(4) man page for details of the
syntax of driver configuration files.
modified 23 Aug 1994 7D-189