One rule to bind them - part III

Apologies for the length of time between this article and the last in the series. Home and work life has been hectic and hasn't left much time for writing.

In the previous article in the series I wrote a how-to on DHCP booting a Solaris installation and passing custom DHCP options. In this article I'll conclude the series and explain what you can do with this information to make your installation hands-free.

What does a begin script do?

A begin script allows you to execute a series of commands before the installation commences, such as backing up files before an upgrade or creating a derived jumpstart profile. I'll be discussing the latter.

In my jumpstart environment a build list is generated which provides the minimum information about each Solaris build I maintain. It looks like this:

DNS:5.10:RNET:Domain Name Server
FIREWALL:5.9:CORE:Firewall-1
CORE:5.10:CORE:Hardened CORE
CORE:5.9:CORE:Hardened CORE
DEVELOPER:5.10:DEVELOPER:Hardened DEVELOPER
DEVELOPER:5.9:DEVELOPER:Hardened DEVELOPER
ENTIRE:5.10:ENTIRE:Hardened ENTIRE
ENTIRE:5.9:ENTIRE:Hardened ENTIRE
MINIMIZED:5.10:CORE:Hardened Minimized
MINIMIZED:5.9:CORE:Hardened Minimized

The first column corresponds to the JSBuild DHCP option that is sent to the client. The second column is the Solaris version. The third column is the Solaris metacluster: Core, User, Developer, Entire, Entire OEM. The fourth column is a short description of the build.

As the name of the article implies there is only one rule therefore only one begin script. This script does all the heavy lifting required to generate the derived jumpstart profile on a per build basis.

Determining what to build

The first thing the script does is extract the JSBuild DHCP option which tells it which build it is installing. If the JSBuild DHCP option empty (due to incorrect DHCP server configuration or use of old style bootparams installation) then the begin script falls back to the build list above and generates an interactive menu for the user to choose a build from.

Deriving the profile

Now the system knows what it is, it needs to know how to install it. This is what the profile does. The begin script tests whether it has to perform an initial installation or flash archive installation by NFS mounting a directory from the jumpstart server and looking for a flash archive. I have an automated process that builds and patches flash archives for each Solaris metacluster (more about this in a future article). If no flash archive is present then the script falls back to an initial install.

The initial install logic looks for a metacluster include file which defines all of the packages to install. The include file looks like:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Minimal Solaris 10 build
# Start with the minimal required number of packages
echo "cluster         SUNWCreq" >> ${SI_PROFILE}

# For performance monitoring
echo "cluster         SUNWCacc        add" >> ${SI_PROFILE}

# To support Compression (gzip)
echo "cluster         SUNWCfwcmp      add" >> ${SI_PROFILE}

# To support the Network Time Protocol
echo "cluster         SUNWCntp        add"      >> ${SI_PROFILE}
...

For Solaris 10 initial installations the script also outputs a profile patch keyword like:

patch patch_order nfs://jumpstart/path/to/10_Recommended

Which applies the recommended patch bundle during jumpstart. For Solaris releases prior to 10 this is done using the JASS install-recommended-patches.fin finish script.

Disk layout and mirroring

The next step is to see if the build has a custom partition configuration. Here is an example partition configuration file:

s0:6144:/:logging:
s1:1024:swap::
s3:4096:/var:logging,nosuid:
s6:free:/srv:zpool:srv
zfs1:free:/opt::srv/opt
zfs2:free:/var/opt::srv/var-opt

This file defines the disk slice, size, file system mount, and options. You'll notice that it caters for creating ZFS file systems as well even though the current 8/07 release of Solaris 10 doesn't. If the custom configuration doesn't exist then it uses a default one.

The begin script (well actually another nawk script) parses the partition configuration and outputs filesys profile keywords for each slice. It also outputs SVM mirroring information for Solaris 10 if a second disk is present with the same geometry as the root disk, again, for older Solaris releases, this is done by a script on first boot.

Preserving information between begin and finish

Once the disk layout has been derived then the begin script has done its job and can exit and hand the rest of the installation over to the installer and finish script(s).

What if you want to use some of the information you just derived in your finish scripts?

You can't just export an environment variable and have it persist from the begin script to the finish script. You have to store the information somewhere that the finish script can read it from. The simplest way to do this is write them out in VAR=value format to a file under /tmp and then source this file at the beginning of your finish script. The information I keep between stages is the build, metacluster, root disk device, mirror disk device, patch cluster release date and whether the system was built from a flash archive or not.

Are we there yet?

Although I have managed to modularize most aspects of a build you can still see the complexity for a build developer in maintaining all of these files. In a future article I'll discuss a new layer on top of JASS that I have developed that consolidates all of this information into a single, easy to maintain configuration file.