Building a Jumpstart Server for Solaris

Peter van der Weerd

In today's computing environments, machines are often just a means to get to the data storage media. They are either there to offer you a place to log into and work from, or to create a path to your data and applications. Every machine that you use, regardless of its purpose, must first be configured. Minimally, you will have to install the OS and perhaps also install additional packages and configure application-dependent files or scripts.

To reduce this installation time, every UNIX variant has some product that offers automated installation of clients. As it happens, most of these tools have a graphical interface. This article deals with the Solaris version of network install. Solaris and graphical user interfaces have never been the best match (no offense); the same goes for the Solaris network installation product, "Jumpstart". To get a working Jumpstart server, you will have to do some additional configuring that cannot be done by using a GUI. To avoid the use of a GUI altogether, I will discuss a complete manual configuration.

How Does Jumpstart Work?

A new machine (client) is physically connected to a network segment. You switch it on, and the client has one or more disks with nothing on them -- not even a bootblock. The client will end up in the Open Boot Prom. In the case of a bootable disk, you can interrupt the boot sequence by pressing <Stop>+<a>.

From the Open Boot Prom, you type boot net - install. This will cause a reset and subsequent boot from the network with the option "install" added to it. Keep in mind that this only applies to Sun's sparc machines. Other vendors also support network install clients and servers, but the options and arguments will differ:

1. All the client knows is its own Ethernet address.