On 03/11/11 10:59 AM, Robert Milkowski wrote:
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?
Assuming you are using the same redirection for the console during
installation, that should be carried through correctly to the installed
instance. User-specified modifications to the menu aren't directly
possible right now.
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.
The uninstall support that's there right now is mostly for dealing with
deficiencies in the way we've been defining group packages. Those are
being resolved and revisiting that to instead provide access to the
recently-introduced --reject functionality in pkg would be useful.
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?
No.
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.
Right now you can't.
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.
Again, right now you cannot.
8. /etc/system
how can I customize /etc/system before the first boot? This is
similar to #2.
Most direct answer right now would be to republish the kernel package
with your own required /etc/system contents.
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.
We're happy to consider additional functionality in that needs to be
provided by AI, but generalized user scripting within the installation
environment isn't up for consideration. You do have the option of
building customized boot images that provide your own post-auto-install
services if you wish, but you own that image.
Dave
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