I have, or am very close to having, a working Jumpstart system for Solaris 8 servers.
ROJ is the Jumpstart server, and the relevant directory trees are /export/home/jumpstart and /export/home/jump_5.8. The former is the global Jumpstart area (useful for all versions of Solaris), while the latter is specific for Solaris 8.
Much of the Jumpstart system is standard, with slight modifications as described by Hal Pomeranz. The local modifications are in the post-install script and the Solaris 8 extra packages directory.
The post-install script is in /export/home/jumpstart/Drivers/5.8/sparc-v120/post. It's somewhat complex and governs the fine-tuning of the Jumpstart installation. Its first task is to ask the admin for a local profile (currently Generic and DirectoryServer are supported). It uses this profile to set various options, including which package sets to install and what rcs.mgr profile to load (see below). Some profiles may also request RADIUS client information.
The best documentation is in the post-install script, however the overview is that it installs various packages, creates some further startup scripts to run security stuff (fixmodes, the rcs.mgr, disabling rc?.d scripts) and then exits. The system reboots, and then runs the startup scripts created by the post-install script. One of these will likely be the installation of the latest recommended patch cluster, which will take a long time and force another reboot. The rcs.mgr initialization will also force a reboot (for things like /etc/system).
After the various reboots, you should have a base system tuned for the purpose indicated by the local profile. Note that you may still need to install software, as some things are best installed by hand (e.g. iPlanet Directory Server, Oracle 9i, WebDB code...).
The Solaris 8 extra packages directory is /export/home/jump_5.8/Packages. I have copied the latest versions of various Sunfreeware.com packages here, along with a few packages maintained by me (ECS*) and the DiskSuite packages. These are in filesystem format. The post install script selects various packages from here for installation.
The other part of this directory is the rcsmgr-snap directory. This contains rcs.mgr initialization files for each of the post-install profiles. There is one directory within here for each profile (or a symbolic link pointing to the Generic directory). This directory has tuned install files for rcs.mgr for that profile. The post-install script copies these, along with the initialization script and configuration file to the Jumpstart client so that they may be installed after reboot.
Posted by Rowan Littell at March 24, 2003 10:20 PM