Unix Tip: Installing Solaris 10 with self-prepared CDs

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Installing Solaris 10 from a set of CDs that I burned myself turned out to take four times as long as I had expected it would and to be a surprisingly annoying process.



The first and most time-wasting problem turned out to be how troublesome it was to feed the CDs into the system at the right time. Because the computer room in which I sometimes work (when I don't have a nice console connection through one of our console servers) is both chilly and equipped with noisy, powerful fans, I do as little work as I can get away with in the computer room and then retreat to my warmed and much quieter office. As a result, I couldn't be there when the first of five CDs needed to be ejected. So, the installation process restarted when I wasn't looking -- several times! There just didn't seem to be any way to force the system to wait for me to insert the second CD. Fortunately, I didn't run into the same problems with the second, third, fourth or fifth CD. Once I got past inserting the second CD, the system waited for me to insert the next CD in sequence and click on the button on the screen to continue the installation.



The installation was very slow at times. I'd come into the computer room, plop down on the two-step ladder in front of the monitor and find myself wondering whether something was happening and, if so, what. What was worse was the sense that I might have missed something. I've installed hundreds, maybe more than a thousand, of systems over the years, I'd say to myself. Why am I feeling so unsure about what is happening here?



These problems followed a couple days spent on downloading the CD images to my laptop, unzipping them and burning the resultant ISO files onto a set of previously blank CDs. Once or twice, I had to start over again because my CD-writing software would complain that some unexplainable error had happened and the CD that I had previously loaded was now unusable.



The process of answering questions about languages and timezones and the networking configuration for the system were as straightforward as ever as was partitioning the disks and selecting the entire distribution. It was only when I didn't know what was happening and wondering if I should be ejecting the CD with a straightened paper clip that I was frustrated and unhappy.



Installing Solaris 10 from a DVD, on the other hand, was quite nice. I don't recall being unhappy with the response of the system when I was entering configuration information and I didn't have to monitor the progress of the install or worry about standing by the system when the media needed to be swapped -- because it didn't.



Downloading the disk images to create the DVD in the first place was as painfully slow as downloading the files to create the CDs. Just because I was going to be cutting a single DVD doesn't mean I only had to download one file. No, I downloaded five separate files to my laptop and then used a DOS command to combine them into a single ISO image. I then wrote that image to the DVD and was ready to go.



I would install with a DVD instead of a set of CDs anytime, but many of the systems that I manage are too old to be equipped with DVD readers. This includes Sparc systems as well as the small number of Intel-based systems that I need to keep up and running.

Clearly, Jumpstart is going to be my choice when installing Solaris 10 on servers without DVD drives. In the meantime, I think I'm going to buy myself a t-shirt that says "I survived installing Solaris 10 from a set of CDs!"