SUMMARY: Installing clients machines under Solaris 2.3

From: Charles H. Buchholtz (chip@eniac.seas.upenn.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 24 1994 - 20:37:17 CDT


------ 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 got so many responses that I'm not going to list each person
separately. Thank you all. Although I still don't have a detailed
plan, I've got enough pointers so that I'm confident I can work
something out.

Almost everyone said, "Use jumpstart". Well, technically, jumpstart
doesn't work for diskless clients. Also, even for diskfull clients,
jumpstart by itself won't install patches on the client. Others
recomended simply cloning the disks, but (ignoring the diskless
issue), I've gotten in trouble before when I had dozens of clients
which weren't in Sun's mysterious, proprietary, undocumented lists.
So I'd prefer to use a standard Sun install procedure if possible.

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.

So, I seem to have all the tools I need to install a slew of diskless
clients.

Thank you all for your help,

Charles H. Buchholtz chip@seas.upenn.edu
Systems Programmer (215) 898-2491
School of Engineering and Applied Science 200 S. 33rd St, rm 154
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104



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