Well – this turned out to be both a nightmare learning process and an interesting little project.

Basically, i have absolutely no way of getting my Solaris machine on the network for the following reasons.

  • There is no ethernet ports in the room where these servers now live.
  • I do not have another wireless network card.
  • Even if i did i am not sure it would be as easy to get ndiswrapper or any other driver working on it.

So what are the other options?

Well – there are several – here are some of the more popular ones

  1. Plug the Solaris box directly into the ethernet port on the FiOS router.
  2. Buy an access point which supports WDS mode and wirelessly bridge from my FiOS router network to the other wireless router at the bottom of the apartment. Plug the Solaris box into the other router.  done.
  3. Setup Proxy-ARP which allows you to bridge from Ubuntu over to Solaris by wiring the 2 boxes together.

I disregarded 1 straight away – this Sun Fire is SOOOO LOUD that i can hear it in the living room when its switched on in another room. Even when i am in the room with it, i can’t hear my wife calling me for anything. So i aint bringing it into the living room.

2 is possible but i don’t have the hardware, and i’d rather not buy one just to get one machine on the network.

So i’m going with 3.

Proxy-ARP is a way of forwarding traffic in a kind of “send it to me and i’ll get it to where its uppsoed to go” kind of way. The idea is to connect the Solaris box to the Ubuntu box with an ethernet cable and then the Wireless card on the Ubuntu box will allow traffic to flow backand forward to Solaris as if it had its own network card.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_ARP

This article goes into extreme detail on how Proxy-ARP is setup and really helped me understand the process.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Proxy-ARP-Subnet.html

I’ll show you exactly how to do it in the next post.

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