Someone on the Solaris engineering team decided to name this feature, Network AutoMagic. But from a server sysadmin perspective, it might perhaps be better named "Never Wake A Monster".
NWAM is primarily useful for people running Solaris on a laptop, who have to deal with wireless in different locations. If you are the console user (that is, physically in front of the machine), and within the GNOME-based desktop, you will have a fairly nice tool that allows you to easily configure wireless, and even swap between location-based profiles for other IP needs. In that context, it is fairly useful. If, on the other hand, your systems are servers which ignore DHCP, it is best avoided.
NWAM gets in the way of doing almost anything intelligent or fancy with the normal network control tools dladm
or ipadm
. It will cause complaints about "Persistent operation on temporary object". Technically, you can add the -t
flag to dladm
or ipadm
, to make your operation temporary as well...