W Sanders wrote: > You must maintain backwards compatibility with the OpenBoot > environment. We just sent back an order of X4100s because the > Jumpstart installation process was full of bugs and incompatible with > our painstakingly developed over many years > Jumpstart-over-serial-port infrastructure. (We could have used the > ILOM's console to worksround this but we found it buggy and it hung > on us several times, requiring power cycles.) We returned the X4100s > and reluctantly bought V210s. >
That's most unfortunate. Some of the differences between the x86 and SPARC network installation model are necessary, but I'm aware there are cases where we probably broke compatibility somewhat gratuitously in the transition to using GRUB (I'm assuming you're referring to Solaris 10 1/06, right?). > The differences in the Jumpstart process were largely undocumented, > or at best poorly documented, and simply did not have two or three > weeks to find wordarounds for the bugs on my own. (I posted several > detail to the old sunforum.sun.com forums but all posts to that site > seems to have been lost in the Forum reorganization. Things like > references to nonexistent Appendices in documents, the confusing > Solaris DHCP server, etc.) > Even more unfortunate. It's too bad we didn't get bug reports filed based on your experience. If you do have more details you can still supply, please post them here. > Basically, the "delta" to transition to any completely new > installation paradigm has to be lower than the "delta" to just > transition to some other OS. Developers can code on any OS, the only > differences between OSes we care about have to do with installation, > maintenance, and disaster recovery. Tread carefully. > I completely agree; often some amount of change is necessary to move forward, but minimizing the collateral loss is something we usually take quite seriously for Solaris. Dave
