Configuring a 4-port Sun Happy Meal card

Some time ago I rescued a pair of 4 port Oracle/SUN Happy Meal 10/100 Ethernet cards and I decided it was time to play with them. There was an issue with the sunhme driver, so I created an akmod package for Fedora 18 to patch the bug on my system so that the patch would be picked up automatically on every kernel update as well. The akmod package is available on github.

There's another quirk to these cards as well. At least on my system there is an issue with renaming the interface names that leads to one of the interfaces being renamed inconsistently(interface name ends up being something like "rename6"). I wanted to rename the interfaces nicely so that I could tell the sunhme interfaces from other interfaces in my system.

In addition to weird renames these cards have only one shared mac-address assigned to each interface, so you can't just match the interfaces by their mac-address, since they're the same.

These quirks made getting the udev rules to match rather challenging. Eventually I found a nice script that scans for the interfaces and creates a template for a proper matching udev rule.

In order to be able to use just on interface without having packets disappearing on the other interfaces, which might not be physically connected I also set unique mac-addresses for all the interfaces.

/etc/udev/rules.d/30-sun-hme.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNELS=="0000:06:00.1", \
    KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="hme0", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/sunmacchanger %k 00:03:ba:a8:58:e5"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNELS=="0000:06:01.1", \
    KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="hme1", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/sunmacchanger %k 00:03:ba:a8:58:e6"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNELS=="0000:06:02.1", \
    KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="hme2", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/sunmacchanger %k 00:03:ba:a8:58:e7"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNELS=="0000:06:03.1", \
    KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="hme3", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/sunmacchanger %k 00:03:ba:a6:58:e8"

/usr/local/bin/sunmacchanger

#!/bin/bash

#make sure the interface is down, otherwise setting the mac will fail
/sbin/ifconfig $1 down
/usr/bin/macchanger --mac=$2 $1

After the changes I just needed to unload the driver, reload the rules and load the driver again and udev magic would happen

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sunmacchanger
rmmod sunhme
udevadm control --reload-rules
#loading my patched version of sunhme driver
modprobe sunhme2g

Now I have 4 100M interfaces on one card. It'll come handy when routing traffic outside my LAN and I could have redundancy in case one WAN connection goes down.

Unless I spesifically tell NetworkManager not to bring up interfaces hme1-hme3, NetworkManager will bring those interfaces up. This causes some log spam:

output of dmesg

[ 6438.361078] hme1: Auto-Negotiation unsuccessful, trying force link mode
[ 6438.369059] hme2: Auto-Negotiation unsuccessful, trying force link mode
[ 6438.373052] hme3: Auto-Negotiation unsuccessful, trying force link mode
[ 6447.974274] hme1: Link down, cable problem?
[ 6447.982269] hme2: Link down, cable problem?
[ 6447.986242] hme3: Link down, cable problem?
[ 6459.990561] hme1: Auto-Negotiation unsuccessful, trying force link mode
[ 6459.998551] hme2: Auto-Negotiation unsuccessful, trying force link mode
[ 6460.002549] hme3: Auto-Negotiation unsuccessful, trying force link mode
[ 6469.603795] hme1: Link down, cable problem?
[ 6469.611764] hme2: Link down, cable problem?
[ 6469.615756] hme3: Link down, cable problem?

You can prevent NetworkManager from needlessly bringing up these interfaces by adding the macs to the unmanaged-devices parameter in [keyfile] section and checking that keyfile plugin is loaded in [main] section's plugins parameter.

/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

[main]
plugins=ifcfg-rh,keyfile

[keyfile]
unmanaged-devices=mac:00:03:ba:a8:58:e6;mac:00:03:ba:a8:58:e7;mac:00:03:ba:a8:58:e8

It's not exactly plug and play, but playing with these cards is a good learning opportunity. It wouldn't hurt to have some kind of graphical configuration tools for doing some of this stuff. It requires some knowledge about udev and NetworkManager + a search engine to do this "manually".