promiscuity

[Paul O'Neill]

Hardware:	Sun 4/110
System:		SunOS 4.0.1 -- nit_if.o and nit_buf.o patches
Application:	statspy w/ patched parse.c from torben at dorsai.ics.hawaii.edu

Recently I've had problems w/ ie0 leaving promiscuous mode and not being
able to make it go promiscuous again without rebooting.  This is easily
detected by very small statspy counts and perfmeter packet displays.  You
can actually watch it happen on the perfmeter.

At first I thought it was a result of running out of streams.  This caused
bizarre crashes that could only be recovered from by power cycling.  After
building a kernel with more streams, the crashes stopped, but monogomy
remained.

Then I noticed that the interface would leave promiscous mode if
rpc.etherd was started, or etherfind was started.  Stopping/starting
rpc.etherd or etherfind or statspy didn't help.  I had to reboot to go
promiscuous again.

So I don't do that anymore.  Now I find that I will lose promiscuity if
I'm in rspy and "detach" an existing statspy object.  What's going on
here?

Does anyone know how to go promiscous again without rebooting?  Apparently
ifconfig(8c) has an undocumented switch (promisc | -promisc) that's in the
usage blurb, but not in the man page.  It doesn't seem to do anything in
this situation. (There's also a (private | -private) switch.  What does
that do?)

Thanks, folks.

Paul O'Neill                 pvo at oce.orst.edu
Coastal Imaging Lab
OSU--Oceanography
Corvallis, OR  97331         503-737-3251