[rescue] Re-Install OS - Netra X1

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Mark Brown wrote:

> 1. Jumpstart it, providing you have another Solaris box..
> 2. Open the lid, and a temporary DVD drive.
>
> My question is, can I USB boot from an external DVD drive?

By the time you got Solaris 10 loaded via USB 1.1, you could've chiseled a
Jumpstart server out of limestone.  Solaris 10 is dog slow to install off
reasonably fast media; I suspect it'd be glacial over a 1.5MB/s (nominal)
link.

I'd be really surprised if OpenBoot will do the proper dance to recognise
the USB mass-storage profile, too.  Although, to be honest, I've not tried
it.

You can Jumpstart off nearly anything (possibly excepting Windows[0]).  The
scripts on the CDs assume Solaris, but if you have a DHCP server, a TFTP
server, and an NFS server (any combination of which can be the same
system), you can make Jumpstart happen.

There is one hiccup when using some versions of Linux for the NFS server
(We were using SUSE 9 with PolyServe's nfsd).  The versions of Solaris
$ork were trying to Jumpstart send some sort of "magic" packet to the
machine hosting the miniroot filesystem.   Linux will ignore this packet,
and Solaris will block, retrying until it gets the response it wants.  I
don't recall more than that; but I do recall that was the reason we had to
move the miniroot from the Linux cluster to a FreeBSD server.

> I figure I can't, but if anyone knows or has better experience that
> could save me un-racking this thing, or firing up another system - that
> would be swell!

The X1 was intended to be Jumpstarted.  It's a shame there was no optical
drive option for it (which the V100 got because this very situation
irritated folks), but, as you said, you can plug in the IDE DVD drive of
your choice, and will will DTRT.


[0] But there's no fundamental reason why it won't work, given a few
     pieces of 3rd-party software.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |