My little SunFire v120 has been asking me to run the latest Solaris 10, and do some testing :), so I set up Sol10 on my Linux jumpstart server, which was happily running my current Sol9 jumpstart. Needless to say, I ran into a multitude of problems, and found many other folks that have had similar issues… The end result of hacking and troubleshooting? The Linux implementation of NFS is simply broken, and needs to be fixed at the kernel level if Linux is to be used for a Solaris 10 jumpstart.
The Solaris 10 NFSv4 client cannot properly mount it’s root filesystem on the Linux NFS server, and the jumpstart fails. Connections to the same Linux NFS server from Sol10 are successful if one uses mount options of either ‘-o vers=3’ or ‘-o proto=udp’ – unfortunately, passing these options for jumpstart in /etc/bootparams with ‘rootopts=:’ seem to be ignored by the Solaris 10 installer.
Several folks reported that they have been successful with implementing jumpstart with the current versions of NetBSD and FreeBSD, so I made backups of my Sol9 flash archives and data, and installed FreeBSD 5.4 on the Compaq 5000R that I was using for jumpstart, as well as serve NFS for my LAN. Following a basic guideline I found, I ran into couple of additional issues, so here is my how-to on Solaris 10 Jumpstart from FreeBSD:
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