"Here's what you need"
Well, sorta. Thanks Shawn, the link is interesting.
Because I'll only have LiveCD in the otherwise empty box (nothing else
installed at all), Dave Miner's USBGEN solution is not an option at this time.
It requires the Mecurial tools installed first, and those are not on LiveCD.
"Well, just do it on another computer" is not an option. And it should not
have to be a requirement. It is nice that Sun makes it an option for those
equipment-challenged. In my case, I have a "1.5Tb with duo-core and 8Gb ram"
stupid box, and LiveCD. I must go from there. Absolute, bet-your-life,
virus-free bootable removable media, without which the contents of the box can
only be taken by physical theft.
It is frustrating that James Liu's LiveCD-to-USB effort is 18months old and the
notion of making bootable USB drives (instead of CDs) is still a dream away.
To quote James "...the current Solaris install is fragile because it hard codes
suport to /cdrom and nfs mounts paths..." and then James talks about several
failures after boot from the USB thumb. Not promising.
Why do I need bootable USB? Because I want OpenSolaris, ZFS, PostgreSQL,
Python, a browser, and a VPN, plus my custom scripts tying it all together,
installed onto the thumb drive ONLY. I want to disconnect & remove the CD/DVD
drive altogether, then tank all tracks of C: D: E: into one raidz1 with nothing
else on them. Kill all working plugs for screen, keyboard, & mouse (leave just
a single USB port working - the one required for the bootable thumb drive).
Connect via the web through the RJ45 jack. That way, I am totally in charge of
the operation of the appliance via web, and totally in charge of updating the
"system" drive by FedEx a new USB thumb.
I'm starting to think that instead of USB, I should use a CF adaptor on the IDE
buss and boot from the drive letter that comes up for an internal flash drive
(just a cf card on the IDE cable), but I know of no CF card that can be made
read-only. Read-only is a very nice way to protect the install from drive-by
attacks from the web.
Does anybody know of a CF that can be hardware-switched to read-only?
But Shawn, all this is getting away from your new site. I welcome a single
repository for "how to get the basic things done" - I've wandered around a lot
trying to pull this info together, and in my wanders I've bumped into others
who have similar questions and don't seem to be getting full answers. If
they've figured it out, they have not reported back; if they've given up they
haven't said so.
I have no problem being on the bleeding edge, but when I finally get something
to work I get even more discouraged when there is no easy way for other
wanderers to know that I've found a solution. It's like navigating the
asteroid belt. Probable collisions, but not with what you are look for. It's
the darndest thing, but under Solaris there are *too many* places to search for
answers, and the community needs some "subsummation" (I made that word up).
The knowledge base is out there, but the wikis are woefully thin, there is no
single "table of contents", and insufficient "google" or "clusty" services to
bring it all together when we submit fuzzy phrases.
Build that into your site, Shawn, and they'll come!
David
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