Remote install question

[weevilone]

I need an easy way to remotely install Solaris 10 on some devices.. Unfortunately they're old Sun workstations that lack an optical drive, and even a second hard drive bay (unless SAS is used, and it isn't).

Thoughts?

Thanks for any feedback.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I was gonna post a link to PXE booting. I have limited experience with it, and it seems to be more of a permanent use tool, like if a box is going to boot PXE everytime.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Any external SCSI adapters or USB available? If you can't get the media on the systems, you'll need Jumpstart...which is likely more work for you...

 

[LCTSI]

I need an easy way to remotely install Solaris 10 on some devices.. Unfortunately they're old Sun workstations that lack an optical drive, and even a second hard drive bay (unless SAS is used, and it isn't).

Thoughts?

Thanks for any feedback.

Workstations with no optical? If they're that old they probably won't support any recent updates of Solaris 10.
If you want to use the latest update then make sure they have 1GB RAM.

Jumpstart is the way to go. You can just grab a Solaris VM and fire it up in virtualbox to serve everything out. I used to keep a VM on my laptop just for provisioning. Plug in an ethernet cable from laptop to the box you need to provision, and you're good to boot/install.

Recent OpenBOOT PROMs can boot net:dhcp so you don't have to worry about BOOTP support. Some OpenBOOT PROMs can even boot from iSCSI , that might even be an option for you if you can squeeze in a fast enough NIC.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Was going to say jumpstart and/or diskless are your only options. Depending on how old you mean is old (i.e. are we talking Sparcstation old, or Ultra 5/10 old), if you are in the Ultra 5/10 and newer range, you can get a USB/Firewire controller if you can find a SIIG SC-UNS012 (it used the same exact USB/Firewire chip used in the sunblade 100/150. They are harder to find now, but they use to be about $20.

That said, you might not be able to boot from a CD/DVD drive connected over USB since I believe Solaris 10 changes the device ID's of USB devices on every boot and the install process requires a reboot during the boot process in which it still needs to read the CD/DVD. Since the device ID changed, you get an invalid boot device on the reboot, halting/failing the install. I don't think firewire suffers the same problem, but I don't think I ever tested booting from a firewire drive on a Solaris box.

 

[weevilone]

Sorry that I had moved on too quickly and just noticed the replies.

The hardware was a bunch of Sun T1000's (SPARC). I should have setup a Jumpserver, but I've not been down that path before so I decided that I'd clone an existing drive that had a very similar purpose. I had planned to simply use dd, but differing disk geometry and the fact that someone built them without slice 2 as a backup slice complicated that.

I wound up going the clone method by manually building the new filesystems, then using ufsdump and ufsrestore to migrate each slice. I had to tweak the vfstab file and add the boot block manually.

The next obstacle was that the Solaris device tree means that the drive remembers which slot it was in, so I made a new master drive with a proper backup slice 2 (in the second drive position).. Then I made each clone to the first disk slot and with the proper network parameters for the target subnet.

It was easy, but had I anticipated a couple of the hurdles, I would have simply setup a Jumpstart. At least I would have familiarized myself with that process, which might come in handy someday.

 

[LCTSI]

Glad you got them going. 🙂

Jumpstart's not so bad, and the documentation is great.