Hi,
I'm trying to deploy AI for Solaris 11 Express and so far it's been
challenging...
I have some questions and I hope someone will be able to help.
1. disk partitioning on x86
There could be multiple partitions or none - how can I force AI to use
entire disk and put one large Solaris2 partition regardless of how a disk is
currently partitioned? There is such an option for interactive installs.
2. console on ttya
If post-install scripts are supposed to be delivered via SMF during a first
boot following AI install, how can I put GRUB's menu.lst for the first boot so
I can pass options like console=ttya-...? What if I need to get information
from an external database about how console should be set-up for a given
server? For the AI/install boot it is easy as it is matter of generating a
proper menu.lst for a given server. How can I do it for the first boot?
Similar issue is with passing specific kernel options on some os/hw
combination due to bugs, etc.
Basically how can I make sure that a customized menu.lst is used during
first boot?
3. pkg performance
The solaris.zlib downloads at about 100MB/s on a GbE network - good.
However then pkg starts downloading packages and the network utilizations
varies between 0.5MB - 30MBs with an average less than a couple of MB/s.
I guess the sporadic 15-30MB/s occurrences are for some large files,
otherwise
the performance is abysmal and it takes far too long to just transfer
packages.
Not to mention that entire process is basically serialized and doesn't make
much use of additional cores on a server. Is there a way for pkg to
download
multiple files at the same time? This could probably help a little bit...
It doesn't have to be able to saturate a GbE link but doing less than 5% is
far
from being impressive.
4. packages install/uninstall sections
In jumpstart if some packages were marked to be uninstalled there would
never
be installed in the first place. Currently AI+pkg installs all selected
packages and then uninstalls packages marked so. Ideally all packages to be
installed and uninstalled should be passed to pkg at the same time and pkg
should come up with the final set of packages to install.
5. tasks
I can see in the install_log entries like "current
task:set_partition_active".
Is there a way to add your own tasks?
6. /export/home
How can I prevent it from being created? I don't want to use autofs for
/home directories, nor I want to /export, /export/home, /export/home/jack to be
created. Unconfiguring it during the first boot via smf is rather silly.
7. root disk mirroring
how can I set-up rpool to be mirrored during installation? Setting it up
post-install during first boot when it will have to resilver several GBs of
data is far from ideal.
8. /etc/system
how can I customize /etc/system before the first boot? This is similar to
#2.
Generally AI needs pre- and post- install scripts additional to first boot
finish scripts via SMF. There seems to be a mechanism for psot-install sctips
already implemented and in use it is just not exposed to end-users which is a
mistake. I don't want some of them to be running and to have undo their changes
during first boot.
--
Robert Milkowski
http://milek.blogspot.com
--
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