Solaris

http://wizard.ae.krakow.pl/~mike/solaris/

Michal Suszycki mike (at) wizard (dot) ae (dot) krakow (dot) pl 21.07.2005

Solaris unattended installation (PXE and custom JumpStart) with Linux server (TFTP, DHCP and NFS)
This document describes automatic, unattended installation of Solaris (Nevada b14 or later that comes with GRUB and pxegrub) on x86 machines using PXE booting and Linux machineserving DHCP and all necessary configuration files through TFTP and installation files (basically this is a copy of Solaris installation dvd) as NFS export.
Nevada is Sun's code name for the Solaris release after Solaris 10. OpenSolaris and Nevada are built from the same source base. Take a look at open solaris and read more about it.

Solaris has support for networked installation butunfortunately almost all documentation (as well as shell scripts) assumes that your installation server will be Solaris. Preparing Solaris based installation server is rather simple because Solaris comes with scripts, like setup_install_server or add_install_client that can configure DHCP server, copy installation files etc. Unfortunately those scripts cannot be run on Linux machines because they need somesolaris specific tools. Fortunately you can prepare your Linux server without those scripts. How does it work Machine that is capable of network booting (so called PXE boot) and has it enabled in the BIOS, doesn't try to boot from local hard disk or CD, but instead it uses DHCP to obtain IP address. It sends broadcast asking for IP netmask, default router, and , possibly many other informationsthat you can specify in the DHCP server configuration file. One of this information can be name of the file that will be downloaded by the machine through TFTP and executed immediately. Usually this file is a NBP (Network Bootstrap Program) that perform rest of the booting process. Whole unattended Solaris installation goes like this: Enable PXE boot (network booting) in the BIOS of the machine andboot it Machine sends DHCP broadcast and waits for a response It gets response from our Linux server with such informations like IP address, netmask and name of the file to download and execute (it's a 'pxegrub' file that is Network Bootstrap Program) It configures network card and then downloads pxegrub from our Linux TFTP server After pxegrub is downloaded it is executed pxegrub then uses TFTP toobtain configuration files (like menu.lst file that contains boot options) from our Linux server. Once appriopriate files are successfully downloaded by pxegrub we should see nice grub menu. After choosing solaris installation from the menu or some timeout (it should have timeout because we want unattended installation) grub loads Solaris kernel with options that tells it to install Solaris system usingNFS for getting distribution files and so called "Custom Jumpstart". Custom Jumpstart lets you specify all the necessary information, for example disk layout, network configuration and list of packages in a file that will be readed during installation and will provide all kind of information installer needs to perform his job without asking any question. Solaris kernel boots and performs its magicstuff, like detecting devices etc. Installation script gets running and tries to obtain IP address from DHCP Then it tries to NFS mount directory exported from our Linux server to download Jumpstart configuration files According to information in these files it starts installing Solaris using distribution files that resides on our exported NFS directory.

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01/09/11 12:57http://wizard.ae.krakow.pl/~mike/solaris/

After successfull instalation Solaris reboots and you should see your machine booting from local disk and showing you grub menu. What is needed Fortunately everything we need can be obtained from internet (like pxegrub or Solaris installation dvd/cd iso). Linux with DHCP server, TFTP server and NFS (can be version 3) server. pxegrub file, Solaris kernel file, Solaris...