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I took a test drive of the OpenSolaris automated installer (AI) utility today.  This is the replacement for the venerable Solaris jumpstart technology and is the only way to install OpenSolaris in a hands-off approach.  Based off my 2 hours of so of perusing the documentation and working with it, I think it is still a work in progress (e.g. I didn’t see any way of having jumpstart-like custom finish scripts).

The first thing I did was read through the automated installer docs.  There isn’t a lot there yet, so it is a quick read, but it will help you get the basics.  Another good place to look for information is the OpenSolaris forum for installer technology (aka project Caiman).

There appear to be several components involved, at least for x86 based clients.  I haven’t yet tried SPARC so am not sure how it differs.

1) DHCP server – to hand out an address and the PXE boot parameters to a client

2) TFTP server – to serve the PXE boot image

3) Install server – an Apache instance that hands back the XML configuration files and the mini root.  In my case it was running on port 5555.

4) Package repository – for fetching the actual packages to install. By default it is pkg.opensolaris.org/release, but you could change it to a different repository (including a mirror hosted locally if you had one).

Note that there is no NFS service needed, this should make firewall admins very happy.

The lab

I built a lab environment consisting of two virtual machines inside VMWare on my desktop.

To keep things simple, the first VM was called “server”, and the second “client”.  The purpose of my lab environment was to configure the AI environment on the server machine and complete a hands-off install on the client machine.

The VMs were configured as follows:

Server

• RAM – 800M
• Disk – 16GB
• NIC1 (e1000g0) – bridged to public network
• NIC2 (e1000g1) – host-internal network

I also went into the VMWare networking tool and disabled VMWare’s built-in DHCP server on the host-internal network to ensure that my server would be handing out any DHCP responses.

Client

• RAM 800M
• NIC1 (e1000g0) – host-internal network
• Disk – 8GB   Note: when I first tried an 8 GB disk  AI complained that it couldn’t find any suitable disks because  it wanted at least a 12.5GB disk.  You can work around it by explicitly specifying which disk you want to install on, in which case the default minimum size limit won’t be  triggered.

Setting up the server

1) Installed OpenSolaris 2009.06

2) Installed the automated install software

I saw from the docs that I needed the installadm utility, which wasn’t on my system.  I wasn’t sure which package this was from, so I ran:

pkg  search installadm

this told me I wanted the SUNWinstalladm-tools package.  I installed that using:

pfexec pkg install SUNWinstalladm-tools

3) Download the automated install ISO image

The installer needs an architecture (x86 or SPARC) specific ISO image for each type of client that will be supported.  Since I was going to install on x86, I downloaded the appropriate image from genunix: http://genunix.org/distributions/indiana/osol-0906-ai-x86.iso

4) Create an install environment under /auto-install named ai-x64 on the 192.168.72.0 network starting at .10 and using 5 addresses

pfexec installadm create-service -n ai-x64 -i 192.168.72.10 -c 5 -s /export/home/wdh/Downloads/osol-0906-ai-x86.iso /auto-install

5) Configure dhcpd to run on the appropriate interface

The installadm command configured dhcpd, but it was running on the e1000g0 interface by default.  For my environment, I needed to switch that to e1000g1 so it would see the requests from the client VM.

pfexec dhcpconfig -P INTERFACES=e1000g1
svcadm disable dhcp-server
svcadm enable dhcp-server

6) Install squid

We will need squid (or some other proxy) since we aren’t running a local repository server and the client machine will need to be able to fetch packages from pkg.opensolaris.org.  We will tell the client machine to use the proxy on the server.

pkg search squid

figure out the package name I am looking for is SUNWsquid

pfexec pkg install SUNWsquid

svcadm enable http:squid

I was pleasantly surprised how easy that was.  If you are on a non-NATed network, you will likely need to edit the squid configuration file to allow access to your clients.

7) Customize the default AI manifest (I’ll call mine ai_proxy.xml)

cd /auto-install/auto_install

make a copy of the default manifest and name it something more specific

pfexec cp default.xml ai_proxy.xml

added <ai_target_device><target_device_name>c8t0d0</target_device_name> </ai_target_device>

so I could use a disk that was smaller then the auto-installer default

added  <ai_http_proxy url=”http://192.168.72.2:3128″/> so it would use the proxy and be able to reach the internet

changed the ai_auto_reboot setting to true, and changed the default user and password from jack to my normal values.

ran installadm to let the AI service know it should use the custom version of the file

pfexec /usr/sbin/installadm add -m ai_proxy.xml -n ai-x64

8) Register the target system as a client

Started the client virtual machine and retrieved the MAC address (  00:0c:29:b6:43:bf )

On the server use installadm to register the client

pfexec installadm create-client -e 00:0c:29:b6:43:bf -t /auto-install -n ai-x64

9) Started the client system in network boot mode

The install succeeded, but it took about 1.5 hours.  I suspect if I had a local repository and was installing on a non-emulated hard disk it would have gone substantially faster.

Overall thoughts

I was happy that it was relatively straightforward to get working, but I think it will be a while before the system has as much flexibility for customizing installs as Jumpstart.  Based on all the traffic I see on the forum, it seems like the AI project has a lot of momentum behind it, so I am looking forward to giving another spin in a few months.  I’d also like to try this with a local mirror of the pkg repository and see how quick the installer will run.

Update on June 24th

I saw this morning that a functional spec for the AI client has been submitted and the project team is asking for comments.  Please read the thread/document and give any feedback you might have.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 8:30 pm and is filed under solaris, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.