[OpenIndiana-discuss] Fwd: Connecting to internet

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-06-19 08:13, Chamila Wijayarathna wrote:
> Hello all,
> I'm new to OpenIndiana. I installed OpenIndiana. But still I can't figure
> out how to connect to internet using USB Dongle. Can somebody tell me how
> to do so?

First of all, is the dongle recognized as present and as a networking
device? Do you use USB2 or USB1.x (USB3 is yet unsupported) controller
and ports? It is also quite possible that nobody has yet made a driver
for a dongle, unless it uses some common chipset and just happens to
work with a related driver.

If the device is indeed recognized, there are two ways:
1) The NWAM (Network Auto-Magic) icon in the menu bar on the top-right
    if clicked it should offer a GUI menu for networked configuration
2) The old Solaris ways of static configuration (though this may be
    unwieldy for wifi and roaming) - then you must disable NWAM and
    enable the default physical networking methods:
      pfexec svcadm disable physical:nwam
      pfexec svcadm enable physical:ndefault
    Then you can use ifconfig and wificonfig to set up IP networking and
    wifi-specific configuration (SSID, encryption type, passwords, etc.)
    accordingly. To fully use the static configuration across reboots,
    you'd have to create or change several text files:
    /etc/hostname.$nicName ($nicName is an aggregation of the driver name
       and the NIC's instance number and optional alias, which you can
       see and manipulate with ifconfig, for example "e1000g1:1") - this
       file should contain your connection's textual name which is mapped
       to an IP address in /etc/hosts.
    /etc/hosts - list of hostname to IP mappings, including your own
    /etc/resolv.conf - reference for DNS lookups, should contain the
       "nameserver" keyword and can contain some others ("search" for
       list of suffixes for local short hostname lookups or "domain")
    /etc/nsswitch.conf - to use DNS, copy /etc/nsswitch.dns over the
       default file and/or make sure you have "hosts: files dns" there
       in whatever order of preference that suits you.

    It is also possible to set up DHCP for dynamically-configured NIC
    addresses and DNS information, which is triggered by presence of an
    empty file (one per NIC, like with /etc/hostname.*); I am more into
    servers so can't help here from memory. I think those files are like
    /etc/dhcpname.$nicname - but you'd better search for information on
    that (perhaps in the scripts /lib/svc/method which set up the net).

Hope this helps get you started,
//Jim