: ------ I asked ------
: I'm scheduled to move our 50 some odd Suns to Solaris 2.3 in two
: weeks, and I'm concerned about setting up all of the clients.
: What I'd like to do is to set up a diskless client, including some
: local customization and about five dozen patches, and then be able
: to say, "make another client that looks just like this one, but with
: this name, IP, and ethernet". I suspect that things won't be that
: easy.
: So, what's the consensus of opinion? What's the easiest way to
: install many nearly identical clients under Solaris 2.3?
: ------ I summarized ------
: Gene Loriot (epl@Kodak.COM) came up with the piece I was missing. It
: seems that there is a special installpatch script (install_supplement?)
: which will install patches on a system whose root is mounted on /a. I
: believe that this script does not come with Solaris, but you can get
: it upon special request from your Sun sales or service representative.
: Using this, I can set up jumpstart to do the patches after the
: standard installation.
: Although it is not explicitly stated, the docs imply that the same
: customization profiles and rules that are used by jumpstart are also
: used when a diskless client is created. However, the only
: "system_type" values are standalone, dataless, and server. I'll get
: Sun to tell me what to do for diskless.
Well, I have two more pieces of information. First, I just got this
letter from Jerry Weber:
: Sorry to get in late on this question. We just installed 15+ diskless
: Suns on a Sparc10 server running NIS and all that we used was
: ttyhstmgr and then we mounted the usr partition as prescribed in the
: 2.3_Recommended patch cluster and installed all the client patches
: with one "install_cluster" command. The same install_cluster command
: works on the server but the README asks that you patch the clients
: first. 15+ machines took about 6 hours start to finish.
Second, I used our telephone support to ask Sun about it.
Specifically, I said that I wanted to install diskless clients using
some sort of profile or template so that I wouldn't have to apply the
patches and local modifications to each client separately, and
although I could put together something homebrew, I wanted to follow
the Sun recommended procedure.
Answer: There is no Sun recommended procedure. Jumpstart/autoinstall
only works for diskfull machines. There is nothing besides ttyhstmgr
for installing diskless machines.
I said, "In that case I'll install and configure one client the way I
want it, and then just copy the root directory and add the entries by
hand (well, by homebrew script) into ethers, bootparams, dfstab, etc.
He said, "Yeah, that sounds OK". So the official Sun recommendation
is to just hack something together. This actually makes me feel
better; it's what I did under SunOS 4.1.3, and now I have their
blessing.
Charles H. Buchholtz Systems Programmer chip@seas.upenn.edu
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Pennsylvania
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:09:06 CDT