Jumpstarting a Remote Server

Jumpstarting On Remote Networks

(Note: this is mostly related to the Uxilium Solutions Quickstart solution, which is a fancy bunch of wrappers around Jumpstart. The specifics might not work for you, but you might find the generalities helpful.)

Sometimes you have a router between the Sun you want to Jumpstart and the Sun which is your Jumpstart server. This causes problems because the initial load sequence for a Jumpstart is:

• rarp for IP info
• rpc for bootparams
• tftp a kernel

What you need is a server (refered to after as a stub server) setup with the minimal amount of stuff on it to get the Jumpstart going, and then hand the process off to the real Jumpstart server once the stub OS is up enough to understand routing.

This entails:

1. set up your source files (bootparams, etheres, tftpboot tree, etc) by pretending you are about to Jumpstart the server on the main network (Uxilium users can run quickstart; I presume that regular Jumpstart users can run add_install_client or similar)
2. getting a boot server stub by running

   # setup_install_server -b $DIRECTORY

   from a install CD set, then copying this over to the stub server (in my specific case, I didn't have any CD drives on the remote network and had to copy everything from the main network) and exporting it.
3. populating /etc/ethers on the stub server with the MAC address of the client system
4. populating /etc/hosts on the stub server with the IP address of the client system and the real jumpstart server
5. running:

   # in.rarpd -a

6. enabling the tftpd server in /etc/inetd.conf
7. copying the /tftpboot tree on your real jumpstart server to the stub server
8. copying the bootparams file from your real server, then editing it to make sure the copy on the stub server uses the stub server for the root filesystem
9. making sure that the sysidcfg file has the correct network information