How to set up a new version of Solaris for autoinstalling on autoinst.nacs:
  1. Download the .iso's from sun
  2. Set up an appropriate symlink for the solaris version under /auto_install
  3. For each relevant .iso:
    1. Extract them with unzip
    2. Loopback mount them on an FC2 (or RHEL3?) system. Be sure to add -o ro,loop to your mount options. Note: sometimes this doesn't work (I believe solaris 8 did not, but solaris 9 did), but apparently you can still avoid having to burn physical media by copying from the loopback-mounted iso9660 filesystem into an ext3 filesystem, and then NFS exporting the copy in ext3 instead of the loopback mount.
    3. NFS export the loopback mount (or ext3 copy) to autoinst.nacs. Make sure you turn off any firewall (temporarily, if you like), and to start up the NFS daemons with /etc/init.d/nfs restart. Be sure to use no_root_squash in /etc/exports, otherwise some things won't be copied correctly.
    4. cd /mnt/Solaris_8/Tools (or the analog).
    5. Set your $PATH to just /sbin:/usr/bin; some of the nonsun replacement utilities (EG, the GNU stuff) cause strange problems with the sun scripts for setting up an install server.
    6. Run "./setup_install_server /auto_install/Solaris-8-02-2004/auto_install" or "./add_to_install_server /auto_install/Solaris-8-02-2004/auto_install" (or the analog)
  4. Copy an appropriate auto_install_config next to your new auto_install directory.
  5. Add the new Solaris release to /etc/dfs/dfstab, as well as 500-host-mounts
  6. Add the new Solaris release to setup-autoinst on okazaki
  7. Test! until it works! If you run into trouble, {t,}ethereal are your friends, and putting set -x into the /etc/rc? scripts can be very helpful as well.
  8. Possibly set your firewall back up - the one you took down to do the NFS export.
See also:
  • SunOS stel during install
  • bpgetfile workaround