In a recent blog John Cecere writes about creating a customized boot DVD for Solaris. He says the process is relatively simple and that there are utilities in Solaris to do large chunks of the work. He notes as well that the procedure is essentially the same for SPARC and x86, the only difference being the mkisofs command line used to recreate the ISO image at the end.

Cecere writes about how to extract and rebuild the DVD image, going through the steps needed to set the customized image up to do a hands-off jumpstart installation. He notes the need to perform this procedure on a system running Solaris 10u6 or newer as there are a number of utilities needed that didn't exist prior to this release.

Cecere's blog addresses the process in several steps:

• Extracting the image
• Extracting the miniroot
• Modifying the miniroot
• Modifying the DVD image for jumpstart
• Putting it back together

The author notes that extraction of the contents of the DVD is much simpler with the advent of Solaris 10u6 and that a cpio of the mounted DVD is sufficient. Once the copy is done, the DVD image will have been staged for customization. Cecere presents the code needed for this operation.

Turning to extraction of the miniroot, it is once again more easily done with Solaris 10u6, where one can use a utility in SPARC Solaris for the extraction. Incidentally, he includes a workaround for a bug that would otherwise cause to root_archive script to fail to clean up after itself.

Having made modifications to the miniroot, the next step involved modifying the DVD image for jumpstart. Cecere provides instructions for performing both a hands-off installation and a flash archive installation. Performing a standard installation, he adds, involves nothing more than specifying the metacluster one is installing in the profile.

With the modifications completed, one needs next to reinstall the miniroot back onto the DVD image, which involves using the root-archive program. The author cautions against reusing packmedia against the miniroot directory once it has been run. In fact, he advises its removal to avoid its inadvertent use.

Cecere walks his readers through the process that leads to an ISO image that can be burned to DVD and discusses creating an ISO image for either x86 or Solaris. Code is provided in both instances.

More Information

Solaris 10 Bootable JumpStart DVDs [...read more...]

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