Just to answer the basic question for anyone who might read this thread down the line, booting from the network requires that you have infrastructure set up so that the machine can get an IP address and information about where to find a kernel and filesystems served by the network. Historically this was done with RARP (get an IP address using your MAC address), rpc.bootparamd (figure out where to load what), TFTP (grab the kernel), and NFS (for filesystems for the rest of the boot image), but you can use DHCP in place of the former two. This is one of several use cases and rationales for having system images available from the network.
Booting from CD-ROM requires either using GRUB to find the alternate boot media, which may not be in the existing menu, or modifying the boot order in the BIOS to find the bootloader on the installation media. With virtualisation, you usually have a choice between pointing it to the drive containing the media or using an ISO image or similar format that's visible to the host OS instance. All you're doing here is using an alternate OS instance that doesn't require a root password to mount up the filesystems on your rpool long enough to change the password. There may be other ways to change the root password, such as using a profile shell with the root role to change the password. Note as well that you can replace the stock sulogin (single-user login) with something like msulogin, allowing you to have multiple uid 0 accounts in the passwd file with user-specific passwords, assuming that you have a strict requirement for password-based access to root, which would hopefully be confined to scenarios like single-user mode login or loss of network login services due to upstream infrastructure failures. (The rationale for multiple accounts is that everyone is responsible for their own root password, and there are separate accounts auditable for each user. SMF even affords you the ability to modify your configuration based on whether you've passed the single-user milestone or whether you've lost network access.) Outside single-user mode, though, there really shouldn't be much of a case for mediating access to root with that account's password. On 7 Jan 2011, at 14:10, Deric Kwok wrote: > Can I ask what is boot server / booting from the network in this url? > > ls it the original installation CD? or specific CD I need to download > > My opensolaris is on top of vmware > > I put the installation CD in DVD rom but it only shows the GRUB from > original opensolaris system. Won't boot from CD rom. > > How can I do this step? > > "Example 25.3. Booting a System When You Have Forgotten the Root Password > Solaris 10: The following example shows how to recover when you forget > root's password by booting from the network. This example assumes that > the boot server is already available. Be sure to apply a new root > password after the system has rebooted." > > Thank you again
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