Hi Tim,
Yes, that simple matter of prgramming gets us some times; but at
least it's only software we need!
Without going through the design document at
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/auto_install/Documentation/ in
all the various ways things can happen. I would say that parsing the
menu.lst file isn't very important, provided one can pass in a parameter
where to find the boot media (i.e. usually passed in as "-B
install_media=http://172.20.25.8:5555/export/home/0906_test";). It seems in
a test I just tried, that it also needs the install service passed in,
however, my understanding is that should not be necessary and can be
gotten via mDNS.
I'm not familiar how network services are brought up in the AI
environment, I only know they are when I need them.
Thank you,
Clay
On Mon, 16 Feb 2009, Tim Foster wrote:
> Hi Clay,
>
> On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 08:42 -0700, Clay Baenziger wrote:
>
>> Of course, PXE booting is effectively DHCP controlled TFTP, so I'm
>> not sure you're out much with PVM here.
>
> Indeed, it's a simple matter of programming ;-)
>
>> Since you can support any protocol of the host, I'm sure HTTP and
>> TFTP aren't much of a stretch. Luckily, just downloading and booting
>> the image off TFTP should get you going, if I understand correctly, then
>> that will using SMF I believe or perhaps a -B option from (py)GRUB, to
>> get the rest of the image from the HTTP based AI image server.
>
> Right, and parsing the menu.lst obtained from DHCP - which was the bit I
> was really trying to avoid having to do. Is the information contained
> in menu.lst stored elsewhere that's accessible to the client?
>
>> I'm admittedly ignorant of booting AI in HVM or PVM, Drew Fisher
>> and I were working on it a bit until he had to step out for a little
>> while as you know.
>
> No worries - thanks for the feedback so far.
>
>>> My problems booting a HVM guest continue:
>
>>> - it looks like smf_netstrategy() in /lib/svc/share/smf_include is
>>> highly suspicious: it seems to only set $_INIT_NET_IF in the case where
>>> the root filesystem obtained via /sbin/netstrategy is "nfs" or
>>> "cachefs". In AI, we have a "ufs" root filesystem, so never set this
>>> environment variable.
>>>
>>> That said, I can't work out how non-xen HVM installs are able to plumb
>>> their primary interface.
>
> I meant to say "I can't work out how non-xen installs are able to plumb
> their primary interface" here...
>
> cheers,
> tim
>
>
