I guess this post will have a somewhat limited life span since Solaris Express is being retired in favor of OpenSolaris. However, some of the pages I always refereed to every time I needed to do this have disappeared, so I’m writing it up again anyway for future reference. Maybe I’ll update it again when I try out OpenSolaris finally.

This will require a Solaris 10 Solaris Express, or OpenSolaris system to be the jumpstart server, and then of course a client that you want to install Solaris Express on.

Step 1, download the Solaris Express DVD image from. Currently, a link to this image can be found here: http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/downloads

Step 2, loop back mount that image somewhere on the jumpstart server.

[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ sudo lofiadm -a sol-nv-b127-sparc-dvd.iso /dev/lofi/1
Password:
[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ sudo mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
[jdboyd@u80 ~]$

Step 3, run the install server script.

[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ cd /mnt/Solaris_11/Tools/
[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ ./setup_install_server /path/to/where/you_want_it

For /path/to/where/you_want_it, I use /export/jumpstart/Solaris_11.  At this point be prepared to wait awhile.  It doesn’t ask any questions while it works, so perhaps you can head onto the next step while still waiting.  When this completes, the install server is installed, so:

[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ sudo umount /mnt
[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ sudo lofiadm -d /dev/lofi/1

Step 4, gather the information you need from the machine to install.  You will need the MAC address, the IP address to use, the hostname to use, and the hardware type, which will probably be sun4u or sun4v.  The IP and hostname will already need to be in DNS.

Step 5, add the client to the install server.  This will use the information from step 4.

[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ cd /export/jumpstart/Solaris_11/Solaris_11/Tools/
[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ sudo ./add_install_client -i $IP -e $MAC $HOSTNAME sun4u

Obviously, you need to substitute the $ items in the above command with the proper values.

Step 6, finally, you are ready to install on the client.  So, on the client, get to the open boot prompt, and do this:

ok boot net - install

At the point, your install proceeds normally. If you get a small stack of “Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet” messages right at the beginning, don’t worry. If it does it seemingly forever (say 15+ minutes), then maybe you do need to worry.

Some of this was taken from http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2005-March/006223.html