Less Known Solaris features: Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit - Part 2: Basic Jumpstart
One basic problem of automated installation is the provisioning of the operating system on the bare metal. Without OS any further configuration is obviously without any relevance. Since several releases Solaris provides a feature called Jumpstart. The basic idea of Jumpstart is the installation of a system by using the network.
The Jumpstart mechanism for PXE based x86
The process of jumpstarting is relatively simple.
- The system comes up. It tries to gather informations about the network
- item It´s own IP, netmask and network address
- item the boot server
- It connects to the boot server via tftp, loads the network boot programm (in this case
pxegrub
and themenu.lst.
) - The
pxegrub
boots the Solaris environment on the client. Themenu.lst
contains the locations of important sources: - config server
- location of the
sysid_config
file - location of the installation media
- location of the boot environment
- The mini root starts. From now on,you have a Solaris Kernel running on your systems.
- It gathers the
rules.ok
from the installation server. - It tries to find a matching profile based on the rules in the
rules.ok
file. - Based on the jumstart profile it formats the disks, it mounts all filesystems like on the final system relative to the directory \verb=/a=
- The installer starts to install the packages relativly to the directory
/a
- After all, it writes the boot loader to the disks
- Now you can reboot the system. </ul> The Jumpstart process on SPARC is similar, but it uses other protocols like RARP and BOOTP to gather the initial configuration at the network boot.