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星期日 十二月 10, 2006

Automatic Installer Makes Solaris the Easiest OS to Install in the World

Suppose you check my blog before, you might have known that we did Solaris Course Training in Shanghai, Beijing and Xi'An. During those trainings, every attending professor has got a Solaris machine to do the Labs with Sun Studio, DTrace and MDB. But do you know how did we install so many machines? Whatever your answer, you may not imagine the below one:





Too bad! You may say so. But we have no choice to do so, said by the professor Zhang and his students from NWPU. Why? Because there are no DVD in the Lab machines.
Fortunately, the Automatic Installer DVD makes it easy and fast to install with DVD drive installed. I know what he means, it takes half a hour to install a whole Solaris system without any human interaction.
And the professor told his students scrizle and hurt their fingers during mount and umount DVD drive. This touched me deeply and put me into the meditating to remove that kinda of annual work forever. With the collaboration with Ben Shen, Kai Li and Edgar Liu, we have developed the Automatic Installer for NetInstall server. The NetInstall Server Automatic Installer DVD, as it means, to install the NetInstall server automatically. And with this server and a flar of the client machine, we can Net Install the client automatically. Ideally, it could install and deploy a Solaris Lab without any human interaction. A good case in point is the Solaris Lab of Capital Normal University. Below are the pictures to show this:






You may say a big "wow!" and think everything is done now. Really? Actually... There are lots of Labs installed with the so-called "Protection Card" . It is a Lab Management system to easily recover if the client system is modified by students or virus. But unfortunately it can not support Solaris now, that means, if you want to do the NetInstall Solaris from the server, you have to unconfigure and umount this card from the client machine mannually. This is the story in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan. John Jiang showed confidence in the Automatic NetInstall after we umounted all the "Protection Card".
In short, the "Protection Card" is a show-stopper for our large scale of Solaris Lab Adoption. This is our next objective after we have achieved the Solaris Automatic Installation from DVD and NetInstall.

Posted at 11:19下午 十二月 10, 2006 by JoeyGuo in OpenSolaris | 评论[5] | Permalink

评论:

Every time I hear someone from sun say that Solaris is the "Best" this or the "Easiest" that I wonder if they have ever actually used another OS.

发表于 Justin 在 2006年12月11日, 03:20 上午 HKT #

Hello, yes pxe and jumpstart could be quite neat. I was wondering if this protection card which i have no experience with supports linux then you could just use a solaris jumpstart server pxe a vmlinuz with a bunch of scripts and either do a dd of the flar or run a small image restoration utility. And to justin from his previous comments. Best or easy is the case for many things when it comes to solaris, now one has to remember that solaris is not that usable as a desktop but its coming there. And try this at home if you have a sparc and an x86 machine. Try windows,linux,solaris netinstall and tell me which one is the most powerfull and more resilient to cross platform installs

发表于 Yiannis Psyllas 在 2006年12月11日, 08:52 上午 HKT #

I run linux and solaris at home, and own 2 suns :-) This has nothing to do with desktop or server... The debian-installer is the most powerful installer I've ever used. Solaris can install over the network, but it requires a specially configured solaris server on the same subnet. You can even do a cross platform x86->sparc install, but you have to follow a different set of instructions. Installing solaris over the network without an already existing solaris server is next to impossible. And even with a solaris server, following suns documentation is extremely difficult - add_install_client is an opaque mess. The debian installer can boot off of whatever media you have, and install from a {http,ftp,nfs} server anywhere on the internet. It also lets you setup raid, lvm, and encrypted partitions during the install. Plus, the process is the same no matter what architecture you are installing on. I am very impressed by the new things in solaris - zfs, smf, dtrace - but the same can not be said for the rest of the included tools.

发表于 Justin 在 2006年12月11日, 12:22 下午 HKT #

Justin, for this time, you'd definitely deserve to try the Solaris automatic installer to simplify the effort of installation to minimum (Just reboot the machine, :-). Please download the DVD ISO at: http://www.opentech.org.cn/software/sol_11_flash_install_cn.iso After download, burn a DVD and try the installation referring to the install instruction at: http://opentech.org.cn/wiki/index.php/Introduction_Guide After your trial, and please give me your comments.

发表于 Joey 在 2006年12月12日, 12:18 上午 HKT #

Justin, you should try the SUNWjet package. No add_install_client anymore...

发表于 Mika 在 2006年12月12日, 04:25 上午 HKT #

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