jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) (06/06/89)
Well, I tried this in comp.sys.sun, which is moderated, and the mail has just bounced back to me (several times, even ;-), so I thought I'd go to the real experts... A situation has come up where it'd be read nice to be able to build a Sun boot tape. The Sun manuals don't seem to cover this. Does anyone know how to do it? The scenario is a client who has a "turnkey" system that is in an unknown initial state, and we'd like to send a tape that can install a standard set of stuff. The users at the system are likely to be real dummies when it comes to computers, and they aren't stongly motivated to become Sun hackers. Imagine your typical army enlisted fellow, and you have about the right sort of image. We can get at the EPROMs in the boxes before delivery, and we believe that we can set them up so that they will first attempt to boot from tape, if that exists and contains a bootable file system, falling back to disk if the tape isn't bootable. The idea then is that the recipient of a tape could just insert it in the drive, turn on the machine, and watch it load itself. It'd be easy enough to put invocations of our own programs into /etc/rc.boot, and we'd be off and installing. In extreme cases, we could even put our own proxy in for /etc/init, which would do its thing, then do a couple of renames to install the real init, and exec it. That's elementary for a Unix hacker. The problem is how we get our stuff into a bootable tape, which is obviously not in the usual tar or cpio formats. I expect my mailbox to fill up with scripts from people wanting to show off their expertise... -- -- All opinions Copyright 1989 by John Chambers; for licensing information contact: John Chambers <{adelie,ima,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)