Less Known Solaris features: Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit - Part 5: The toolkit
Now we get to the tool that will be the centerpoint of the whole tutorial: The Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit. This tool was started as an internal tool by some project engineers to make their job easier. And with the time a really mighty tool was born.
The basic idea behind JET
The Jumptart Enterprise Toolkit (JET) was designed as an add-on to the normal Jumpstart process. It solves two major challenges:
- Jumpstart works exceptionally well to install the operating system and to do configurations in conjunction to the operating system, but misses some easy to configure features to execute further configurations of higher-level configuration besides of having hooks for
finishscripts. - Some people find it a little bit complex to configure. While i strongly believe, this isn´t the case, i have to admit, thats hard to remeber the commands when this is not your everyday task
With both issues in mind, some Sun Engineers start to develop the Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit. Basically it´s a bunch of clever shell scripts.
- The Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit configures the Jumpstart Server accordingly to the configuration in a template.
- Furthermore it provides a framework for application specific modules to install and configure them.
When using JET you don´t have to hassle around with all this files explained before, making the installation easier.
Additional features of JET
JET isn´t just a config generator for Jumpstart. You can configure JET in a way to fully customize your system. Much of this capabilies comes from a link called S99jumpstart or the respective SMF service. This script has an important role: It executes further actions on the system on following boots. For example, the mirroring of harddisks isn´t done by integrated functionalities of Solaris Jumpstart. Those would make this action unavailable on Solaris 8 for example.. It´s done by a script located on the server and made available by NFS, but executed on the client by using the S99jumpstart script. This concept makes the JET a very flexible tool.