Note that if the machines which need some sort of non-network boot process have both floppy and CD-ROM drives, and you don't wish to use QuickJump, then Sun supports booting from the Solaris CD-ROM and reading the profile information from a floppy disk. If this fits your needs then it might be the way to go since it is significantly easier than creating JumpStart Disks. This process is described in the Solaris Advanced Installation Guide.
Fundamentally what we're going to do is to take all of the files that a machine doing a standard JumpStart would normally get from servers over the network and copy them onto a 2 GB or larger external disk. The boot process is modified so that it mounts slices from the external disk instead of making NFS mounts over the network.
Knowing what scripts perform which tasks as a Sun boots during a JumpStart is essential to understanding what changes need to be made for a JumpStart Disk. As such, that will be the first thing I cover. I'll then cover how I setup the slices on the JumpStart Disk. Then I'll cover the changes I made to the boot scripts and my reasons for doing it the way I did.
Note that my description of the booting process is not applicable to
a general Solaris boot. The JumpStart root image is significantly
different from the root image on a Solaris machine.
At any given time, the system is in one of eight possible run levels. A run level is a software configuration under which only a selected group of processes exists.See the init(1M) man page for more information about the theory and operation of init. For our purposes it is sufficient to know that when booting with the JumpStart root image the default run level is level 2. Init first runs /sbin/rcS. This script performs a number of basic steps.
Some further explaination of some of the steps above is warranted. First is the step where it configures the network interfaces. rcS runs ifconfig with the auto-revarp parameter which tells ifconfig to use RARP to get the IP addresses for each interface. Next is the step where rcS configures the hostname, domainname and routing. To do that rcS runs a program called /sbin/hostconfig with a parameter which tells hostconfig to use bootparams to get that information. See the hostconfig(1M) man page for more info. Next rcS configures all of the network interfaces with the appropriate netmask. It gets the netmask from /netmask which according to the comments in rcS is setup by setup_install_server. Lastly is the step where rcS figures out where to mount the CDROM image from. If the root directory was mounted via NFS then rcS runs a program called /sbin/bpgetfile which makes a bootparams request for the install entry from bootparams and rcS mounts that. If the root directory was mounted via UFS or HSFS (disk or cdrom) then rcS tries to mount slice 0 of whatever device the root filesystem was mounted from.
Init then runs /sbin/rc2. In the JumpStart root image rc2 does not do anything.
Init then runs /sbin/startup. Startup sets things up so that Openwindows will startup and run /sbin/sysconfig and then startup starts Openwindows.
/sbin/sysconfig runs sysidnet, sysidnis and sysidsys. See the man page for these programs (they share a common man page) for more information but suffice it to say that all three programs expect you to have a working network connection, a NIS server on your subnet, etc. sysconfig then execs /sbin/suninstall.
/sbin/suninstall is the main JumpStart script. It is quite large and I am not going to try to describe everything it does. However, its first step is important to us. The first thing that suninstall does is run a script called /usr/sbin/install.d/profind. Profind is responsible for mounting up the profile directory. Profind first tries to mount the floppy drive as the profile directory. If that fails then it calls /sbin/bpgetfile asking it for the install_config entry from bootparams. Profind then tries to mount whatever path it got back from bpgetfile.
| Slice | What goes there | Size (MB) |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | sun4u root image | 150 |
| 1 | sun4m root image | 150 |
| 3 | dump images | ~1200 |
| 4 | profile directory | 5 |
| 5 | function directory | 5 |
| 6 | CDROM image | 450 |
| 7 | logs and saved files | 10 |
The JumpStart Disk thus contains all of the things we would normally mount up from the network during a JumpStart.
Pick a SCSI id for the disk that isn't in use on any of the machines that you wish to JumpStart, as we will be hardcoding the id in some scripts. sun4m machines use ids 3 and 1 for their internal disks. sun4u machines use ids 0 and 1 for internal disks. Thus id 2 or id 4 might be good choices.
The /sbin/rcS script is where we need to make our first changes. rcS normally uses a program called /sbin/bpgetfile to make bootparams requests to figure out a lot of the information it needs to perform the steps above. Also, when rcS configures the network interfaces it tells ifconfig to use RARP to get the IP addresses. The assumption with the JumpStart Disk is that we are on a network without these services. Since we won't be using any services on the network it is not important if the interfaces are configured incorrectly, etc. However, it is important that the CDROM image be mounted from the right place. So we insert a bit of code to force rcS to mount /cdrom from slice 6 on the external disk. That code is inserted just above the call to mount. With Solaris 2.5.1_1197 the mount call is at line 420 of rcS. The code that we insert is:
Usrtype="ufs"
mnt_opts="ro"
Usrfs="/dev/dsk/c0t4d0s6"
/sbin/sysconfig is where we need to make our next change. As I mentioned above sysconfig runs three programs (sysidnet, sysidnis and sysidsys), all of which expect to have services available on the local subnet. Again, we don't need NIS or other things to be configured for our JumpStart to proceed when using a JumpStart Disk so we comment out the calls to these three programs. However, we do want to set the correct hostname and IP address for the machine because these settings need to be stored on the machine after we restore the dump images. The restore function in the finish script gets the hostname by running uname -n and the IP address by doing an ifconfig of the main network interface and looking for the inet entry. Since setting these things up is what sysconfig would normally do I decided to put my code for setting them up in sysconfig. It also allows the user to enter these things fairly early in the JumpStart and then leave the machine alone while it finishes. If we just modified the restore function to ask for this information it would require that the user babysit the JumpStart until it gets to that point. I added this code just after the commented out call to sysidsys but frankly it could go anywhere. Adding it at the end of the file might make more sense (above the exec of suninstall of course).
# ----------------------------------------------------
# Figure out which network interface to use
GETIF=`ifconfig -a | grep le`
STATUS=$?
if [ $STATUS -eq 0 ]
then
IF=`echo $GETIF | awk -F: '{ print $1 }'| head
-1`
else
GETIF=`ifconfig -a | grep hme`
STATUS=$?
if [ $STATUS -eq 0 ]
then
IF=`echo $GETIF | awk
-F: '{ print $1 }'| head -1`
else
echo
echo "ERROR: Could
not establish the interface name!!"
fi
fi
correct=0
while [ $correct != 1 ]
do
echo "Enter hostname: \c"
read hostname
echo "Enter IP address: \c"
read ipaddr
echo
echo "You entered:"
echo "Hostname: $hostname"
echo "IP: $ipaddr"
echo "Correct? [y/n] \c"
read response
if [ $response = "y" -o $response = "yes" ];
then
correct=1
fi
done
# Set hostname
uname -S $hostname
# Set IP address
ifconfig $IF $ipaddr
# -------------------------------------------------------------------
Note that the changes to /sbin/rcS and /sbin/sysconfig need to be made to the root images on both slice 0 and slice 1.
The last change we need to make is to /usr/sbin/install.d/profind. As mentioned above, profind is responsible for locating and mounting the profile directory. To do so it normally makes a bootparams request for the install_config bootparams entry for the host and mounts that directory. We modify profind to just mount slice 4 from the JumpStart Disk. First we insert the following function after the floppy, bootparams and cdrom functions already in the file.
qjd ()
{
PROFILE_DISK=/dev/dsk/c0t4d0s4
mount -F ufs -o ro ${PROFILE_DISK} ${SI_CONFIG_DIR}
>/dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
verify_config ${PROFILE_DISK}
${PROFILE_DISK}
fi
}
Then near the bottom of the file we comment out the calls to the floppy, bootparams and cdrom functions and replace those with a call to our function.
# Search for profiles in the order:
# floppy (Custom JumpStart)
# network (Custom JumpStart)
# cdrom (Factory JumpStart)
#floppy
#if [ ${ESTATUS} = 1 ]; then
# bootparams
# if [ ${ESTATUS} = 1 ]; then
# cdrom
# fi
#fi
qjd