Building A Solaris 10 Recovery DVD

Results & Conclusions

I must admit I was pretty apprehensive at first about trusting this procedure to produce a viable stand-alone recovery disk. Since I needed this image to do further research on Solaris 10 and I didn't want to start the tedious process of recreating it from scratch if the recovery disk failed, I broke down and bought another identical hard drive and swapped it in place of the original one. Fortunately, the drives were still on sale. As it turned out, the recovery worked flawlessly - my system was easily booted and "cloned" from the DVD in about 45 minutes.

However, there were some discrepancies that made me question some parts of the procedure. During the recovery disk's installation process, I was asked the usual questions about node name, root password, IP address, netmask, disk partitioning and file-system layout. I wonder if I had entered different information if it would have overridden the information on the flash image. If so, the sections titled "Create A Solaris Jumpstart Profile", "Creating & Validating The Rules File" and maybe others may not have been necessary. Unless one of my readers knows and writes to tell us in the forum, that will be another project for me at a future time. One thing that was left undone was the networking setup. Despite the information already existing in the flash archive and me entering it in the sysidcfg file inside the miniroot, the system came up without networking configured. The drivers and devices were there, but I had to go through the usual Sun network setup procedures (ifconfig command) of plumbing and configuring the device, and entering the appropriate information in the /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname.sfe0, and /etc/netmasks files. Not much work, but still puzzling.

Overall, the stand-alone recovery disk is a reliable way to ensure you can duplicate the OS plus default software baseline of your patched and configured node with little time and hassle. Because of the size limitations of current DVDs, it's recommended that any additional software or important/personal files you wish to keep be backed up on separate media. Finally, I wish to thank the individual(s) at efnet.net for posting their work titled "x86_Flash_DVD_for_Sun.htm" on-line so that we could all benefit from their experience.

Christian Joaquin Cruz is a Phoronix reader and freelance writer. Christian can be reached at cjoaquincruz [at] peoplepc.com. You can discuss this Solaris how-to guide in the Phoronix Forums.