2008-06-21

Given:  an Ultra-60 without CD-ROM drive and with
no operating system on its disks, and a running 
x86 Solaris 10 (u3?) on another computer on the 
network, 

Do:     a new installation of Solaris 10 (u5, May2008).


As ever, the documentation is huge, with separate sections
for the permutations of sparc/x86 installation server,
sparc/x86 client, dvd/cd source, local/wide-area network.

The successful network booting happened after:

[on x86 installation server]

mount -F nfs dint:/home/scratch /mnt 
lofiadm -a /mnt/sol-10-u5-ga-sparc-dvd.iso
mount -o ro -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /cdrom
cd /cdrom/Solaris_10/Tools/
mkdir /srv/sol10_u5_sparc
./setup_install_server /srv/sol10_u5_sparc
share -F nfs -o ro,anon=0 /srv/sol10_u5_sparc
svcadm enable svc:/network/nfs/server

mkdir /srv/sol10_u5_x86_boot
./setup_install_server -b /srv/sol10_u5_sparc_boot
share -F nfs -o ro,anon=0 /srv/sol10_u5_sparc_boot
./add_install_client -e '08:00:20:c4:e5:52' -s 10.0.0.35:/srv/sol10_u5_sparc ultra sun4u

vi /etc/bootparams
(modify server hostname to address, since the x86 server isn't
 properly in DNS; modify also the boot path to the copy rather
 than the one on the DVD image -- perhaps running the add_install_client
 from the /srv/sol10_u5_sparc_boot copy was the preferable thing
 to do)

[on sparc installation client]

boot net



Then it worked.  The initial problems seem to have been 
due the the bad naming (the x86 server's DHCP client not 
registering the hostname, and the reference to a hostname
therefore not working until modification of /etc/bootparams)
and the use of the path to the DVD image rather than the 
boot copy (which was not NFS shared).  It *might* also be
that having added the specific ethernet address and name 
to the DHCP server of the network's master server (dint) 
was important.  Using the network's DHCP server alone, without
modification to point to specific files on the installation
server, was not enough; the ./setup_install_server -b and 
./add_install_client seem the quickest way to get it all 
working.