From: Eric Watson (ewatson@law.harvard.edu)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 10:09:56 EDT
Dear Sunmanagers:
The response to my posting yesterday was gratifying - too many too list by
name. Thanks to everyone, and I'll certainly be following up with a few of
you.
1. It seems that for my needs (3 machines total), the way to go is to build
the first server, then ufsdump the slices elsewhere, boot off a CD, then
ufsrestore the slices to the 2nd and 3rd servers. Keep in mind that I'm on
a very tight schedule, and while other approaches are more elegant and
better in the long run, this method will get all three machines up and
running in June (hardware is expected at the end of may).
2. A second approach that will work well for me (we already use DiskSuite
to mirror on existing Solaris 7 machines) is: "Mirror the boot disk with a
volume manager (DiskSuite would be easiest), then transfer the "mirrored"
disk to the new system." We're getting pairs of disks for each new machine,
the disks are hot swapable, so this would be easy.
3. As far as a more elegant approach, the consensus is to use the Webstart
Flash or Flash Archives (I assume they are the same thing) utility that's
part of Jumpstart. Suggested references are:
* http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130621544, Chapter 11 of this book
covers cloning systems using Webstart Flash.
* docs.sun.com
A warning on Flash:
"Flash Archives under JumpStart work very well for this sort of thing.
One thing to be wary of though, if you are cloning Solaris 8, there are
some bugs related to the use of Flash archives larger than 4GB (which
yours will most likely be if you are cloning a system with copious
quantities of 3rd party software) and with NFS mounting the flash
archive for installation. These problems have been fixed in 9, but last
I heard, they were not going to apply these patches to 8. If you are
interested, I probably have some notes from when I worked through these
issues, and could e-mail them to you. Or, you should be able to find
the work-around for each on "BigAdmin" on the sun.com site."
4. As far as Jumpstart itself, the consensus is that it works, but it's
time consuming, won't be able to easily pick up my third party software, and
is probably overkill for what I'm doing.
Thanks again!
Eric
************************************
Eric P. Watson
Supervisor of System Administration
Services
Harvard Law School 617-496-6518
************************************
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