Hi!

Is there any possibility to determine whether some Solaris machine has PXE enabled? I need some kind of a utility, which I could invoke remotely.

Thanks!

PXE is pretty much confined to x86 type boxes. If you are running Solaris x86 is may be possible to use PXE to provide a boot image.

Is you have a Sun Sparc based system, you can do a "Stop A" to get to the "OK" prompt. From there you can run "boot net" or "boot net -install" depending on your intentions. This will look for a Jumpstart Server (another Sun box). It will use bootp to locate this machine and optain an IP address. Sun has some Jumpstart docs you can read for more information.

In order to do either of the above remotely you will need some sore of remote console. For older boxes, you may want to go with a Digi Portserver type solution. For new boxes, they typically have a LOM (lights out management) network port you can configure. This gives you console access over the network and is available as long as the power cord has power running through it even if the system is powered off.

Sorry, I did not make myself clear. The situation is the following:

I have a computer that runs a Solaris OS. Suppose I have e.g. a telnet or ssh access to this computer, is it anyhow possible by invoking some commands or programs to find out whether this computer supports booting from network and if it supports, then is this option selected in BIOS?

You may still need to clarify something, is it a PC or a Sun system?

If it is a Sun system, it inherently supports booting from the network.

If it is a PC, the only way I know that you can confirm if it can PXE boot is to reboot and look at the BIOS settings. Windows and Linux have some tools that interface with the BIOS so you can look at some settings, but I don't recall Solaris x86 having any of these (but it may).

If it is a PC, you may also be able to look at the docs online from the vender that built it to determine if you can PXE boot it.

Great, thanks for the info!

Does sun system have any tools/interfaces for BIOS which I could use for getting information about PXE support?

I found Intel documentation for PXE which says that on x86 one may either call 1Ah interrupt function in real mode to find this out, or scan the base memory for "!PXE" or "PXENV+" signatures. However, the doc says that this method is arch-dependent, so, I guess, on sun systems there should be some other method.

Do you know about any of such methods?

Maestro,
You still have not answered the question completely:

Are you running Solaris on a PC or on a Sun system?

From your comments I am guessing it is a Sun system in which case there is no PXE. As I explained earlier it uses bootp from NVRAM (similar to BIOS but not quite the same). I suggest you go to docs.sun.com and read about NVRAM and OpenBoot. The 'eeprom' command will let you interface NVRAM from the OS, but again there is no PXE and NVRAM is not BIOS!