Hi Mike, Thank you for taking the time to use AI and to provide such detailed feedback. We appreciate it! My comments/questions inline... > 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. > Really? I have been testing sparc the last week and it only took on the order of 5 minutes or so to download the boot archive with wanboot. When you were able to push the 900Mbit/sec speed in testing, what were the differences, other than wanboot delivering the data? Are others attached and using the same network? I would like a bit more information on the network during the wanboot process. Normal network trouble shooting data, like bandwidth, dropped packets, retries... As I said, I did not see the times you are describing. > 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: > well.. file enhancement requests for inclusion of these if you want. However, in trying to keep the microroot small choices have to be made about what we must include. > # 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" > I believe this will be fixed with the putback for 7218 which was integrated on 4/6. Not sure if the bits you installed had this changeset. > - 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 > > > Hmm.. this should work I believe as a result of the putback for 4488. Let me take a look at the changes that went in for this bug and get back to you. > 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. > >
