[OpenIndiana-discuss] XStreamOS distro available

[Jim Klimov]

On 2012-09-20 17:11, Gabriele Bulfon wrote:
> Hi, sure boot environments are there, inside illumos kernel.
> About networked installtion, probably this is a different thing.
> If I well remember, there was some kind of software you may add to Solaris 10 to make it a
> network installation server, do you think it's still available and usable with illumos?


Well, it was a number of different softwares (and the source must
still be available in SXCE branch, if that is published anywhere).

Basically, a Solaris install server was a mix of BOOTP/DHCP/TFTP
server which took care of the new machine getting an IP address
and pointers to the installation server and the bootloader image.
In case of SPARC and X86 this was done differently, the latter
relying on PXE and DHCP, and SPARC doing BOOTP. I think both used
TFTP to ultimately get the bootloader or a small installer miniroot.

The install server was essentially a TFTP server with the installer
miniroot image and an NFS server with a copy of the DVDs. It could
also optionally have a JumpStart directory with profiles of different
clients to automate setup of things, like package profiles and disk
layouts, but this almost did not use ZFS, allowing just some trivial
things at best.

The two servers were usually set up on one box, but could be separated
(i.e. one central installation server and many boot servers, one
available in each subnet of the organization).

There was also a project called UberJS which implemented similar
logic (installer, jumpstart profiles, packages) on a standalone DVD
that you could customize and burn. If LAN connectivity was available,
the DVD could update host profiles after boot; otherwise it was
sufficient to install different things on different hosts from
same physical media.

I guess nowadays an install server might serve an installer miniroot
preconfigured (or fetching a config-update file over net) to use the
install server as an IPS repo for packages.

I haven't seen this with illumos, so can't say whether this still
exists in the live code repo; you can look at AI images for example.

HTH,
//Jim Klimov