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Can anyone help;
Due to some hardware changes my Tru64 Unix V5.1b has changed the name of my network device from ee0 and ee1 to ee2 and ee3. Is it posible to change them back again and how.
Thanks in advance.

Also has anyone seen the rumour about the Alpha chip being resurected, see theinquirer

Hello foobar,
Your problem is not an uncommon one, we see this all the time when students don't return the network adapter to the original slot or the configuration changes due to partitioning. The soltion may not be for the faint hearted though.

The issue here is, the slot in which the adapter was first installed is assigned the first numbers. For example a DE602 would be named ee0 and ee1, when the adapter is moved to a new slot it gets new names such as ee2 and ee3. These are only “names” though. The system hardware is divided into three parts or subsystems and are identified as component, SCSI and name.

It is the name system that causes the problem in that it references all components in the binary /etc/dec_hw_db database which contains the hardware persistence information. This database is maintained by the kernel driver framework and includes data for buses, controllers and devices. The name is therefore associated with a slot rather than the hardware component, thus when the adapter in the original slot is moved to the new slot the old name becomes a non existent device.

To solve your problem you could do the following;

You can find which devices are registered in the current kernel subsystem

hwmgr –view hierarchy | grep ee

Then

hwmgr –show name

To find the original name ie ee0 and ee1, and the new ones, in the listing and record the persistent info which should be some thing like
HWID: NAME HOSTNAME PERSIST TYPE PERSIST AT
51: ee2 system1 CONTROLLER pci260 slot 4
52: ee3 system1 CONTROLLER pci260 slot 5


Next you can remove the names from the out of the persistent database without removing it from the running system.

hwmgr –remove name –entry ee0
hwmgr –remove name –entry ee1
hwmgr –remove name –entry ee2
hwmgr –remove name –entry ee3

You can now add the entry back in again but specify the changed component number, ie from 2 to 0 and 3 to 1.

hwmgr –add name –component_name ee –component_num 0 –component_type \
> CONTROLLER –parent_name pci –parent_num 260 –slot_num 4

hwmgr –add name –component_name ee –component_num 1 –component_type \
> CONTROLLER –parent_name pci –parent_num 260 –slot_num 5

Check the persistent database again to make sure the devices are registered and at the correct names.

hwmgr –show name

Hi foobar,

In Tru64 UNIX V5.xx the names ee0 etc are part of the hardware management name subsystem.
Use
# hwmgr -show name
to see the relevant details.
The word "name" is significant since it refers to the name of a location: PCI bus number/slot etc
If you move a network card from one slot to another, then ee0 still refers to the original slot where the first card used to be but is no more and if the card is put into a free location it will become ee2 (assuming we start with ee0 and ee1) If you move the card in ee1 as well to a free slot you end up with
ee0 - no device
ee1 - no device
ee2 - found device, the one that used to be ee0
ee3 - found device, the one that used to be ee1

If you do a
# hwmgr -remove name -entry ee0
# hwmgr -remove name -entry ee1
# hwmgr -remove name -entry ee2
# hwmgr -remove name -entry ee3
etc and reboot they should be found again and
become ee0 and ee1 again.

It is possible I think to do this without a reboot using hwmgr -edit name ....
but I've forgotten the syntax.

Regards Tom