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 pxegruband the menu.lst.)
• The pxegrub boots the Solaris environment on the client. The menu.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.

Jumpstart Server

Albeit the Jumpstart Server is an important part in the process of installing the operating system on the server, it´s a passive part. The Jumpstart process itself ist executed on the client, not on the server. The server is only nescessary to provide information and the installation media. It uses existing protocols for this task as RARP or DHCP for sending configurations to the client about the network or NFS and HTTP for providing access to the installation files.

Further Development

At the beginning Jumpstart was just able to do the installation. Recent versions include functionality to automatically create boot mirrors (Recent in Solaris context means Solaris 9 and up ;))