It Must Be Time for Tea

Friday April 01, 2005

v20z and PXE boot

I've got a v20z system that I use for testing, and I want to do a fresh install of Solaris on it. There's a PXE netinstall server on the same subnet, so I figured I'd just do a PXE boot. But then I had to figure out how to PXE boot a v20z whose console is a serial line connected to a tip server. Pressing F12 (repeatedly) during boot didn't work, using either xterm or gnome-terminal.

With some systems, there's a magic key sequence you have to enter instead of F12. With other systems, you press F2 to get into the BIOS, and you reconfigure the BIOS to boot off the network. The v20z is one of the latter, but there are a couple gotchas.

1. Not only do you have to put the network at the top of the boot device list (use the "+" key), but you also have to put the hard disk at the bottom of the boot device list (use the "-" key).
2. On a Solaris color xterm, the selected BIOS menu item is invisible.