The Pointer Sisters on Crack

(Cross-posted to unixadmin)

Why, pray tell - you denizens of the Solaris world, must I have a DHCP server to jumpstart my X4200? I never had to have one using SPARC architecture, and its beyond my present understanding why one is required to jumpstart an x86 box with Solaris 10.

Here's one answer, but it doesn't make my question any less valid:

From Sun:

Jumpstart on SPARC machines traditionally made use of RARP, BOOTP etc to get the required information for building over the network. This method does not work on x86 based machines, and required that there be a boot server on every subnet.

DHCP is the method used by x86 based machines to start a non-attended network boot, and it also has the advantage of being able to traverse subnets through the use of DHCP forwarders.

However, its often a little more difficult to set up, configure and manage . To accomodate the x86 based servers, and the ability to jumpstart over multiple subnets, we have added DHCP support to the core toolkit.

There are also some new x86 specific configuration variables in the base module.

Possible DHCP configurations

* Local DHCP server hosted on the Jumpstart server.

* Remote DHCP server.

* Multiple remote DHCP servers.

If all you need to do is install x86 based servers, then the first option is the easiest to configure and set up. Additionally if you configure the routers as DHCP forwarders, you can also jumpstart on any subnet that can "see" this DHCP server. Unfortunately this scenario is slightly unrealistic as its likely that there's a real DHCP server lurking somewhere.

This is where option 2 becomes useful. If there is already an enterprise wide DHCP server, and its running Sun's DHCP, then you're in luck! All you need to do is set up an ssh relationship between your server and it, and JET will do the rest for you.

Finally, there may in fact be multiple DHCP servers, possibly one per subnet. JET allows you to specify which subnets are served by which dhcp server.

That's not an explanation as to why it doesn't work. All my research points to x86 being able to support RARP and TFTP/BOOTP both. Sun calls the DHCP boot PXE's default configuration suggesting alternate methods which do not require DHCP.

Taking advantage of this new twist however, I told my boss my jumpstart project was now complete...in theory.