[geeks] Solaris install with Jumpstart

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 12, 2009, at 08:10 , Lionel Peterson wrote:

> Shannon,
>
> You're a better man than me - I'd have given it one day before I  
> invested in an external DVD drive ;^)

Well, I was going to have to get one anyway for another project, so  
that killed any reason to avoid buying one.

I only tried Jumpstart because I didn't feel like going shopping in  
the morning.

I waited until evening when I had to go out anyway to get the drive.

> On SPARC hardware, the network install instruction (not Jumpststart)  
> that Mr. Bill linked to works very well. You tell the server the  
> architecture, MAC, IP, and hostname and then 'netboot' the system to  
> be installed, then the install proceeds as if the media were local.  
> Couldn't be easier.

Network install is pretty easy, so there is no reason for it to be hard.

It's nothing complicated: shuffle the OS to the machine with pxeboot  
or whatever ROM support you have, and then after that it is just a  
matter of using some standard network file transfer.

> Out of curiousity, what does it take to perform an interactive  
> solaris install on a PXE-booted x86/x64 box?

The PC pxeboot part is trivial.

The main issue seemed to be configuring DHCP and bootparams to  
recognize the PC and configure it to start the OS transfer.

It's not a hard process, just something in there was not working.

I think it might be something about DHCP macros.  Some of the  
documentation on that self-conflicts, so I probably have errors in  
there, not sure.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com