[SunHELP] Re: SunHELP digest, Vol 1 #1593 - 2 msgs

[Dennis Murphy]

On Thursday, April 4, 2002, at 01:00  PM, sunhelp-request at sunhelp.org 
wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I'm not actually asking for help, but rather offering it incase anyone
> else runs into the same issues.  If someone's maintaining a FAQ, this
> would be a good thing to add to it.
>
>
> One of my recent fun tasks was to build a whole slew of SunBlade 1000's.
> This sounded like a job for either JumpStart or good ol'e dd.  I opted 
> for
> dd of course as the lesser of the two evils.   Why?  It's a pain to set 
> up
> JumpStart to begin with, it eats up a lot of bandwith when you have lots
> of machines to setup, and it's much slower than cloning a whole drive.
>
> And if anything goes wrong, you'll have to mess around with the 
> configuration
> all over again, jump all over again, and repeat until you get it to 
> work.
> Too messy for my taste.  Instead, I built one box with everything I 
> wanted
> exactly as I wanted it, and use dd/installboot.
>
> But then I ran into something wicked.

Now you know why Jumpstarting the host is not necessarily a Bad 
Thing! :-)  Sure, a Jumpstart server takes some time to get _right_.  
But once it's right, it's right :-)  Finish scripts are your friend!

Quite seriously though....  I wouldn't worry so much about the bandwidth 
issue -- if you're on a 100base-T network (what do you mean you're 
not?!?), you can jump several hosts at the same time without any real 
performance problems.

It takes about an hour and change for me to jumpstart a host, and that 
includes all my layered product installs, patches, security 
modifications, reboots, etc...  It works really, really well.  In fact, 
the longest part is waiting for the hardware to POST (E6500's are slow, 
E10k domains are worse!)

On the for-what-it's-worth note... I recently migrated my desktop from 
an Ultra 60 to a Blade 1000.  After copying over my partitions, I did a 
slick /dev and /devices hack that works perfectly --

I had a sol8 boot disk already in the Blade 1000.  I did the following 
to copy the device trees from the "old" boot disk to the one I just 
migrated from the U60:

cd /mnt/root
mv dev dev.old
mv devices devices.old
mkdir dev devices
chmod 755 dev devices
cd /dev
find . -print -depth | cpio -pdm /mnt/root/dev
cd /devices
find . -print -depth | cpio -pdm /mnt/root/dev

It worked perfectly. :-)

--DM