Solaris

Hello guys.

As my first post I'd like to briefly day that I work with unix relatively often but nothing too advanced however I am an enthusiast and learn quickly.

After doing some reading I was able today (For the first time) to perform a network solaris installation (Solaris 10) by using another solaris server as the install server.

My problem starts in the fact that my next step is usually to boot from a second DVD which performs a veritas SF installation. This usually goes by me booting into the DVD (By running "boot cdrom - install" from the OK prompt) and after a few seconds I get a question of which disk to install Veritas to and then it starts extracting the whole thing.

After I found out that this DVD also contains the Solaris_10/Tools directory, I proceeded to create the install server, adding the client machine and then doing "boot net - install". Everything looked fine except that instead of getting the question of where to install Veritas and then the extraction, I was thrown inside the Solaris installation procedure again (Asking which nic interfaces to configure and so forth).

What am I doing wrong? How can I boot a DVD from the network in the exact same way that it would have booted from the physical media?

For information, this is Sparc Solaris 10, platform is sun4v, on a T5220 Sun machine.
I am not using jumpstart, no configuration files or anything. Oh and if anybody is wondering the reason I am booting from the network is because the DVD reader of the second server is broken and it usually takes too long to replace so I am trying to cut down on time (Plus I am eager to learn).

Regards
NooK

That's the root of the problem -- you can't. The computer isn't going to pretend to have an entire fake DVD drive at the hardware level, which is what it'd take to fool a complete operating system...

So what you are saying is that it is not possible and that network booting is only really possible when installing Solaris itself?

It's strange how the Solaris installation DVD is 4.5 Gb in size (or so) but this second bootable dvd is only 2.5 Gb yet it tried to perform a full Solaris installation.

I am guessing that this second dvd is a slightly modified version of the original Solaris DVD (Like a flash archive but not exactly) since it has most of the directories found inside the original Solaris DVD.

If anybody has any idea on how I could inspect what is inside this DVD and what exactly it is doing/running when you bot from it physically, I'd appreciate any tips. Maybe I can mount the ISO file inside the server and run everything manually without actually having to boot into it.

EDIT: OK after some more digging, it seems that the DVD is simply making using of a flash archive file (.flar). I can find instructions on how to deploy the flar over the network using WAN via a install server and also web server. Is there any way to deploy the flar over LAN using similar methods I described above for Solaris installation without requiring a web server or any simpler way than having to configure web server, creating miniroot, using jumpstart and so forth?

Regards
NooK

I'm saying that for netbooting to be possible, the OS has to be aware and capable of netbooting -- there's no "fake DVD" involved.