Nevada to OpenSolaris on SPARC
For some time now I’ve been running my own Sun Ray server on my Workstation (Sun Blade 2000), so I can transfer my sessions home, and still be running relatively current (if not bleeding edge) bits.
The time has come to take the plunge and migrate to OpenSolaris as a base image instead of the Nevada builds.
I’m already running with a root ZFS pool and I have a lot of things separated into different filesystems.
The approach that I have elected to take is to actually get a lab machine (another SB 2000) installed and running with what I think is everything that I need, and then utswitch to it and run for a couple of days.
Here is where the problems started.
The box I am using has no graphics head and no CD/DVD drive, so I have to use jumpstart with the Automatic Installer. OK fair enough.
Even with the latest OBP on the box (from patch 118323-01 – January 2005!), while the machine supports a DHCP boot, it doesn’t support http as a file transport.
After a little searching I found a solution on Steven Stallion’s blog.
Well almost. As I said, the machine has no drive to drop a Nevada DVD into. We do, however have a lab jumpstart server with Nevada images. The trick I used was to do a SUNWCreq (absolutely minimal) install of a recent Nevada build onto this machine, reconfigure the jumpstart for the Automatic Installer, and then follow Steven’s instructions with the exception that the boot command was simply:
ok boot -F wanboot -o dhcp
I also had to make sure that I installed to the 09.06 image as the configuration I was using listed package names from that image (not the new ones in dev).
Once I sorted that out, the installation ran swimmingly.
We have a Sun Blade 2000 with OpenSolaris 09.06 installed. However, this is not quite what I wanted. I need the machine to be running the developer builds.
Simple enough, login as jack and add the developer repository, making it the preferred one.
jack@sb2000-b:~$ pfexec pkg set-publisher -P -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev opensolaris.org
and kick off an image update.
The current state is that it’s still doing this as I am packing to go home for the day. The upgrade from 09.06 to current developer is a bit over a gig.
After this is done I need to look at the following so it is doing everything my current machine is doing.
- install NIS (as NISplus is gone) and NIS did not come pre-installed on 09.06.
- install SRSS 5
- install MySQL
- configure apache
- build and install an imap server with mh support (for my older email archives)
- transfer the other ZFS filesystems from my workstation to this machine
Once that’s running I’ll run for a few days with this lab machine as my Sun Ray server to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything, break the zpool mirror I have on the workstation (just in case I need to go back in a hurry) and make some extensive use of zfs send, ssh -C and zfs receive, and a couple of other tweaks to transfer the image onto my actual workstation. You know it may be even quicker once I break that mirror to simply put that drive into the lab box to replicate it. We’ll see how it goes.
More as I progress.
