Solaris: Check hme ethernet link speed, duplex, and status

Contributed by qmchenry  
Tagged: Solaris networking  

When troubleshooting networking issues, it is often helpful to determine the state of an ethernet interface. Solaris offers access to many configurable networking parameters through ndd.

To determine the ethernet interface link status, duplex, and speed on hme0, run the following commands as superuser:

ndd -set /dev/hme instance 0
ndd -get /dev/hme link_status
ndd -get /dev/hme link_mode
ndd -get /dev/hme link_speed

If you have only one ethernet interface, you can leave out the instance command. Otherwise, you can specify the hme instance number there. The results of the next three commands are either 1 or 0. In each case, the value means:

link_status: 0=down 1=up
link_mode: 0=half duplex 1=full duplex
link_speed: 0=10Mbps 1=100Mbps