Hi Dave, > I will just add that there were other questions in my prior response > which have not been answered (Sean answered the Kickstart one for you, > at least). I'd suggest trying to answer them, and having a crisp > definition of your goals in relation to the OpenSolaris installer, as > a starting point for discussion. Materials I've seen so far are based > on the legacy Solaris 10 installer; the user experience envisioned > there is much too complex to be viable. > > Dave I'll try to answer those.
> In the context of an interactive installer (though it could also apply > to the automated case), what capabilities are available to > automatically discover potential iSCSI targets for a particular system? The commands iscsiadm and devfsadm should be enough. The first thing needed is to plumb the interface connecting the initiator system and the target system, unless the installer will force the interface connecting both systems to be configured via DHCP. Then, a normal iSCSI target discovery would need iscsiadm to configure the target params, but for the particular case of installations (iSCSI boot), iscsiadm will read those values from the NIC's iSCSI BIOS, so only enabling the discovery of the target will be needed (at least that happened with jumpstart). $ iscsiadm modify discovery --sendtargets enable $ devfsadm -i iscsi At this point, both iscsiadm should see the target: $ iscsiadm list target -vS Also format will show a disk in a format such as c2t6080020FFF6675E10000000C00000000d0. At this point, normal procedures apply. > My bias is towards providing something simpler than what's in > Anaconda, if at all possible. At the moment we'll only be able to install opensolaris in a iSCSI target if we install an iSCSI-boot capable NIC. These NIC's provide a BIOS where all the parameters (initiator IQN, target IQN, target server ip, target server port, authentication method, [user], [pwd] ...) need to be specified so the BIOS will discover the target and boot from it. I don't know the reason why Anaconda requires to specify those (maybe Linux doesn't read the info from the NIC?), but at least on Nevada the miniroot read those values from the NIC's BIOS so there's no need to specify them (i.e. in the manifest) If this is the case, we would only need information to plumb the interface connected to the target system (again, unless AI will force to use DHCP here) The only problem would be, we don't necessarily know the disk name before we actually discover a particular target once (I believe it'll be the same in next executions), so the installer should know which root_disk to use after the iSCSI target is detected and the device for it is visible in the system. > > Dave > _______________________________________________ > caiman-discuss mailing list > caiman-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
