Remote install of solaris on a 220R

Thu Jun 24 22:31:35 PDT 2004

Quoting David M. Dowdle (ddowdle at leopard.net):
> It's a PITA, especially if you want to try stipping the system down to
> only install the minimums. Don't bother, install everything, then
> uninstall things. You'll save yourself hours of headaches if you don't
> know solaris interdependacnies backwards and forwards. The solaris
> installer/package manager is the worst I've ever seen (and you've heard me
> bitch about RedHat's. this makes RH's look like a god).

They did package management in 94 or so and don't seem to
have revisited it since.

I never install EVERYTHING, but will install the one below "everything"
(do I need drivers for toshiba sparc boxes? no).

Then you get to build tools and make packages.  Unless you trust
other people.

NetBSD's pkgsrc (www.pkgsrc.org) runs pretty well on Solaris (and
AIX and MacOS and Linux).  It's not perfect (or as good as on netbsd).
ports in (Free|Open)BSD = pkgsrcin netbsd

> The console definitions are 'odd', I've never figured out what it thinks
> it is, best I can advise is turn flow control off.

And I've never had a problem.  But then, I own spiral bound
UUCP books from OReilly, so maybe 25 years of arguing with
serial ports did something.

I just set xterm.  And I use real serial cables (with HardwareHandshake pins)

> You need a newer version of solaris 8 to support the 220R. The original
> (think first year's worth) will install, but it won't be able to boot. The
> documentation with the 220R should say what REV is required, assuming it
> wasn't purchased with the box.

Not AFAIR.  I *think* I ran 2.7 and 2.6 even on them.

At this point, Solaris 8 is close enough to EOL that I'd certainly
use Solaris 9.  I'm playing with Solaris A  (after 7, 8 and 9 is
"A", we all know this).  It's beta or early release or whatever.

> Depending on how many boxes it is, dd'ing the drives may be faster than
> setting up a one-time jumpstart server.

Yes, but jumpstart means fast rebuild and is good for resume.

> FYI the console connecter is an RJ-48, it's pinout differs from a Cisco or
> any other rj-48 console connecter I've found. The pinout is avail on
> SunSolve, buried deeply of course.

!?  RJ45, you mean?  Well, it's a DB25, either way.

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/E220R/E220R.html

I'll just note for completeness that Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD
all boot on the 220..

(Linux was running SunOS (4) binaries faster than SunOS did back
early in the linux/sparc port).

It's not a powerful machine, by any measure.  It's now 5 years old.
I was delighted when it came out that it didn't have disk slots
like the E250 that made clients think they could fill it with disk
and have fast systems.  The 220/420R meant that they bought hardware
RAID boxes.