Unix as a Second Language

Setting up Jumpstart clients

Once your jumpstart server has been set up, you can go about the work of detailing the clients that you want to install. Each client will be described in what is called a "profile", specifying how that client will be installed. You also need to add some information about each client to your /etc files -- notably the /etc/hosts and /etc/ethers files. This provides your server with the ability to answer the request that the client will make for its IP address during the boot process. Since each client will know its hardware (MAC) address, it will use this information to try to request its IP address. The server will look in its /etc/ethers file to match the MAC address with a hostname. Then, it will look in its /etc/hosts file to determine the client's IP address. Here's an example of how those files might look: /etc/ethers

0:3:ba:b6:6a:de boson0:3:ba:7c:46:15 fermion

/etc/hosts

# jumpstart clients#10.3.2.111      boson10.3.2.123      fermion

In this example, when boson boots, the 0:3:ba:b6:6a:de MAC address will retrieve the hostname "boson" and the hostname "boson" will retrieve the 10.3.2.111 IP address. Jumpstart clients can only boot from a server on the same subnet so, if your clients are on a different subnet, you will also need to set up a boot server on the same subnet as the client. The boot server will provide the initial support for booting the client. Your jumpstart (or "install") server will then provide the OS files to complete the installation. For this column, we assume that the jumpstart server and client are on the same subnet. In last week's column, we saw the commands for enabling tftpboot on Solaris 10. The tftp service will be used to transfer boot files to the clients we are now setting up. Once a client has received its IP address, it will be able to transfer and boot from files that will be set up in the /tftpboot directory. I will give an example after we look at adding the client to the server. With a number of clients' /etc/ethers entries have been set up, I like to use a simple script to run the add_install_client script for each of them -- thereby avoiding the tedious syntax. In the script shown below, the jumpstart server (newos) will set up the files in /tftpboot and entries in the /etc/bootparams file for each system listed in /etc/ethers. If you don't want to add all the clients in your /etc/ethers file, put the target systems' /etc/ethers entries in another file (say /tmp/ethers) and modify the script to use that file instead.

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