Very quick summary: - I was successful at installing build 111 using AI. - It was hard, partially because of so many new and new-to-me parts - I had no viable x86 box on the right network segment to run the install server - Proxy support needs to improve at multiple places
This message is intended to help others that may be trying to do the same. There are some rough edges that I point out that I assume are known issues but I haven't searched them all out in bugzilla yet. More details... I started out trying to figure out how to cope with the lack of a system that can do AI in the lab where my sun4v box is at. I figured this couldn't be too hard. I just needed an ipkg branded zone on a different LDom. Talk about Chickens and eggs. I'll work up a blog post to describe how I did this. The high level of what I did on a SXCE 108 install is: 1. Get pkg-gate from mercurial 2. Build pkg 3. Install pkg packages 4. Fake global zone's notion of entire 5. Create the zone 6. Install the zone 7. Configure the zone 8. Install installadm, mkisofs 9. Mount iso in zone 11. Create install service 12. Configure DHCP Hmmm... looks like the 12 step program to end my addition to SXCE. It seems really strange that I need DHCP to use wanboot. I tried with just wanboot but the install failed very early on. Wanboot is slow. Really slow. I'm not sure of the exact time, but downloading the 167 MB boot_archive took ~40 minutes. In tests that I did last week, I was able to push over 900 Mbit/sec between the same two boxes. If wanboot cannot be improved due to problems with openboot or similar, the boot_archive needs to be stripped down to the point that it knows about network drivers and whatever is needed to load the image into a ramdisk. I started out with an LDom with 700 MB of memory. That failed with an error message that made a lot of sense to me, but my guess is that the typical person may be confused. I lost the exact message. After the first failure, I added 1 GB of RAM. This time it errored out when pkg couldn't find pkg.opensolaris.org. Because vi is not in the miniroot (sigh) and my svccfg-foo is lacking, I worked around this with something like: # cd /lib/svc/method # mv auto-installer auto-installer.orig # cat > auto-installer #! /bin/sh http_proxy=... export http_proxy /lib/svc/method/auto-installer.orig "$@" ^D # svcadm clear auto-install This got the installation going. Then I ran into bug 6804. http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=6804 I added 300 MB of memory (now at 2024 MB) and tried again. With the aforementioned http_proxy workaround applied again, the installation completed without problems. Hooray! Along the way I also had troubles due to... - When the install server is rebooted, it doesn't start serving whatever it was serving before. Each time I needed to run "installadm start sparc-preview" - installadm doesn't cause an apache instance to start to serve wanboot.cgi. As such, after rebooting the zone I needed to run /usr/apache2/2.2/bin/httpd \ -f /var/installadm/ai-webserver/ai-httpd.conf Key areas of improvement that would help a lot are: - Add a global and/or per-mirror proxy server to pkg. That is, when accessing pkg.opensolaris.org I need to use a proxy, but if I have another repository inside my company, I should probably access that directly. - Enhance AI to deal with proxy servers reasonably. - Make the pkg.opensolaris.org repository mirror-able using something other than rsync. Output from "zfs send" and "zfs send -I" over http or https would be great. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
