Installing Solaris 10 on a Sun Enterprise T1000

Installing Solaris 10 in a T1000 is not as easy as you think as this machine doesn’t have any USB ports nor optical units, just ethernet interfaces.

We will need:

1. Another machine with Solaris or OpenSolaris. I am going to use a VirtualBox machine with OpenSolaris as I don’t have another Solaris machine. The ethernet should be configured as “bridged” in VirtualBox and the host machine must be in the same subnet as the T1000 where we want to install Solaris.
2. The Solaris 10 64bits install DVD for SPARC (sun4v). I downloaded the image and mounted it inside VirtualBox.
3. The OpenSolaris server and the T1000 must be in the same subnet. We can get the T1000 MAC address from the OpenBoot or from the documentation.

We load OpenSolaris in the virtual machine and we mount the install DVD:

1. Mount the DVD
2. Be root
3. mkdir -p /path/to/anywhere/sol
4. mkdir -p /path/to/anywhere/config
5. cd /cdrom/cdrom0/S0/Solaris_10/Tools
6. ./setup_install_server /path/to/anywhere
7. add in /etc/dfs/dfstab: share -F nfs -o ro,anon=0 -d “install dir” /path/to/anywhere/sol and add the path to config too.
8. Run shareall and share and check the folders are shared.
9. Check that nfsd is running: svcs -l svc:/network/nfs/server:default if not, execute it svcadm enable svc:/network/nfs/server:default
10. cd /cdrom/cdrom0/S0/Solaris_10/Tools
11. ./setup_install_server -b /path/to/boot
12. cp /cdrom/cdrom0/s0/Solaris_10/Misc/jumpstart_sample/* /path/to/config
13. edit /path/to/config/rules
14. write: network net_ip.0 && arch sparc – profile -
15. edit profile
16. write install_type initial_install
    system_type standalone
17. edit sysidcfg
18. add standard lines without root_passwd
19. cd /
20. umount the DVD
21. Edit /etc/hosts and add a new entry with host1 ip_t1000
22. cd /path/to/anywhere/Solaris_10/Tools
23. ./add_install_client -e ethernet_t1000 -s ip_server:/path/to/anywhere/sol -c ip_server:/path/to/anywhere/config -p ip_server:/path/to/anywhere/config host1 sun4v
24. Check in /etc/bootparams root_server is not localhost, it has to be the OpenSolaris server ip.
25. Boot the T1000, when we see the promt >ok type boot net -v – install
26. The installation will start, follow the onscreen instructions.