Extended Options For Solaris' Jumpstart Boot

Hey There,

Most Solaris Admins are familiar with the basic procedure for kicking off a JumpStart installation. Bare bones, it's usually getting down to the PROM and executing one of either:

ok> boot cdrom - install

or

ok> boot net - install

There are, however, quite a few more options you can throw at even the older Solaris boot PROMs to kick off your JumpStart the way you like. Note that in the below examples, the "|" character is used to indicate an either-or option.

For instance, you can boot directly off of the local hard disk with this option:

file://jumpstartDirectory/compressedConfigurationFile

or from an NFS server, like so:

nfs://serverName|IP/jumpstartDirectory/compressedConfigurationFile

Even an http server:

http://serverName|IP/jumpstartDirectory/compressedConfigurationFile

To flesh out the above examples to a certain degree, these would the type of commands you would type at the PROM ok> prompt:

ok> boot cdrom - install file://jumpstartDirectory/compressedConfigurationFile
ok> boot net - install nfs://serverName/jumpstartDirectory/compressedConfigurationFile
etc...

In certain modes, you will boot from a tar file on your JumpStart server. Just make sure you've placed your sysidcfg inside your tar ball and try this:

ok> boot net - install http://192.168.0.1/jumpstart/config.tar

And, if you use an http server, you don't even need to go through all the hassle we explored in a past post about using JumpStart across multiple subnets, because you can add the "proxy" option to that argument (much like our workaround for JumpStart across subnets, you need to specify the IP address of the proxy, and not the hostname), like so:

ok> boot net - install http://xyz.com/jumpstart/config.tar&proxy=192.168.0.0.1

Hopefully, some of this trivia will prove useful to you at some point. Now there should be almost no way you can get out of having to JumpStart that new server ;)

Cheers,

, Mike

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