Creating and Removing Device Aliases

Creating and Removing Device Aliases

The OpenBoot monitor is able to store certain environment variables in nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM), so that they can be used from boot to boot, by using the nvalias command. For example, to set the network device to use RARP for booting, we would use the following command:

ok nvalias net /pci@1f,4000/network@1,1:rarp

This means that booting using the net device, as shown in the following example, would use the /pci@1f,4000/network@1,1 device to boot the system across the network:

ok boot net

However, if we wanted to use the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) to retrieve the host’s IP address when booting, instead of using RARP, we would use the following command:

ok boot net:dhcp

To remove the alias from NVRAM, you simply use the nvunalias command:

ok nvunalias net

This would restore the default value of net.