Install Solaris w/o booting - possible?

[Ravi Kuppanna]

Well, this is certainly do-able and we have done this many times.  Same problem
as yours, Client's don't like downtimes...

All you need is another machine of the same arch (sun4u, in your case) that has
the OS of your choice installed in the way you want it. If not, if you can get
hold of a sun4u box, install the OS and configure it. Once this is done, slice
your new disk the way you want it, NFS mount the OS disk from your spare sun4u
perform a dump-pipe-restore. After this dump, all the OS stuff is on the new
disk, you can further configure it. Now, don't forget to install the bootblock
on a sun4u machine onto this new raw device via installboot. Configure your new
disk, change the boot-device and reboot -r.

If you know all the variables, this is real easy. If you are not really sure
what you are getting into, this is not for you.

HTH

Ravi Kuppanna
Mobil GIS - Technical Computing.





Gregg Mackenzie <gmackenz@ball.com> on 07/27/99 11:25:32 AM

Please respond to Gregg Mackenzie <gmackenz@ball.com>

To:   ssa-managers@Eng.Auburn.EDU
cc:    (bcc: Ravi Kuppanna/C/Dallas/Mobil-Notes)
Subject:  Install Solaris w/o booting - possible?





Question:  Is it possible to install Solaris without *booting*
           from the cdrom?

Scenario:  E3000, six SSA 114s, Solaris 2.5.1, boot disk is an
           SSA disk, mirrored in another SSA.  Two empty disks,
           either in the E3000, or in the SSAs...probably
           doesn't matter in this case.  Root disk filesystems
           need to be repartitioned.

           The system is a production system, eg. the smaller
           the outage window, the happier the customer will be.

I plan to upgrade to Solaris 2.6 by installing to one of the
empty disks, replicating the customizations and localizations
from the old root disk to the new root disk, and then changing
the appropriate NVRAM values.

What I'm wondering is, is there any way to do the bulk of the
installation without taking the system offline?  In other words,
can I manually run whatever install program(s) need to be run
against one of the empty disks as the target?

I seem to recall from the "olden days" (early Solaris 2.x, I
think) that one could run a program called 'suninstall' in such
a fashion--I only had to do it once, for a different reason, and
I was very much a novice at the time, so my recollection of it
may be faulty--but I don't see anything that resembles suninstall
on the 2.6 CD.

I can't imagine I'm the first one to ever think of doing this,
but I've searched the ssa-managers archives, sunsolve, and
dejanews and haven't found any similar scenarios.  The closest
I came was Sunsolve Infodoc 12161 for how to install 1.x and
2.x on the same machine.

Thanks for any help on this.

Gregg Mackenzie
gmackenz@ball.com