Wise people learn when they can; fools learn when they must - Arthur Wellesley

Thursday, 18 September 2014

Flar Installation -- Solaris

                                                
                                               FLAR INSTALLATION

Personally I love this method of installation… it saves lots of time and unnecessary extra Patching / Configuration Burden.

It can be used as BACKUP TOOL also…if have such spaces… it never failed I personally used this as backup and restore several times just 20-30 minutes and server is ready...

SO… what does it do ?

It’s like Image of that Particular time… Just create and use at backup or to Build New Server Install…

**make sure to take the "df -kh" o/p for disk layout -- if planned to use as bkp**


Very simple to create & Very simple to implement

Let’s do it…

Created a 5g slice

root@sol-test-2:>/# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s0

root@sol-test-2:>/# mkdir /flar-test

root@sol-test-2:>/# mount -f ufs /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s0 /flar-test

IF want permanent then make an entry in /etc/vfstab otherwise I have no issues in mounting it again after reboot

root@sol-test-2:>/# flar create -n test-flar-image -c /flar-test/test-flar-image.flar

Instruct the system to create a flar (flar create) whose name (-n) is test-flar-image and compress this (-c) then store at this location /flar-test/<name of flar.flar> 

After hitting this cmd go and have some snacks & tea… it will take some time

root@sol-test-2:>/# flar create -n test-flar-image -c /flar-test/test-flar-image.flar
Full Flash
Checking integrity...
Integrity OK.
Running precreation scripts...
Precreation scripts done.
Determining the size of the archive...
10264182 blocks
The archive will be approximately 2.81GB.
Creating the archive...
10264182 blocks
Archive creation complete.
Running postcreation scripts...
Postcreation scripts done.

Running pre-exit scripts...
Pre-exit scripts done.

root@sol-test-2:>/# du -sh /flar-test/
 2.8G   /flar-test

Well… flar has been created and compressed also… Now what ?

Just share it and done…

root@sol-test-2:>/# vi /etc/dfs/dfstab
share -F nfs -o ro /flar-test

root@sol-test-2:>/# shareall

root@sol-test-2:>/# share
-               /flar-test   ro   ""


OK… all set…

Let’s Play…

Every Thing has a downside… In Flar… we have only one Drawback… that we need to boot it from cdrom first then the flar will take over the charge…

SO… Begin the installation on other system [must be on same subnet]



The installation process will be normally carried out…


Fill all required info as asked…


Wait after filling all fields…

We will get a window with heading SOLARIS INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION


Here we get 2 options
F2_Standard                F4_Flash         

We need to select F4


Again answer few questions then we get a page with heading

FLASH ARCHIVE RETREIVAL METHOD


Here we have to select nfs [b’coz we had shared our flar image via nfs]

We have to provide the location of our shared folder
NFS Location:              host:/path/to/flash_archive.flar
                                    192.168.234.134:/flar-test/ test-flar-image.flar [I provided this info]






After that it will attempt to find this file on given location…

Then we get the info about disk config… The great thing is that we can manipulate the disk space as per our convenience…

Well at 5.09 the installation has begun 
and finished at 5.38


Generally it is not taking that much time, but pretty good on vmware with limited resources

Now the test machine is up…
root@flar-testing:>/# df -kh
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0      9.6G   5.1G   4.5G    54%    /
/devices                 0K     0K     0K     0%    /devices
root@flar-testing:>/# hostname
flar-testing

root@flar-testing:>/# cat /etc/hosts
192.168.234.155 flar-testing    loghost
The most imp part is…
We have all users / patches / packages / installations / configurations Here same as Source Server….


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