Solaris Webflash

Starting with Solaris 8 04/01, there is a new feature called WebFlash. While far from being a Solaris equivalent of  Norton Ghost, this is a good way of storing a production ready system in a cpio archive.

Until WebFlash in Solaris 8, Sun Microsystems did not provide a disaster recovery tool as an integral part of the Solaris product. As opposed to the IBM AIX UNIX environment, which has mksysb, and the Hewlett-Packard HP-UX environment, which has Ignite-UX and make_recovery. While not providing a formal disaster recovery (cloning) tool, Sun Microsystems does provide some very useful utilities to aid in the process of disaster recovery. Specifically, these utilities are

• ufsdump
• ufsrestore,
• dd, cpio
•  tar,
• format,
• prtvtoc, f
• mthard,
• installboot,
• JumpStart.

When combined, these utilities can produce a  powerful disaster recovery toolset.

Flash archives are mirrored images of a system that can be installed on another system of the same architecture. The flash archive can include third-party packages as well as optional Solaris components like Solstice DiskSuite. According to the Sun docs, a flash archive is just a cpio archive.

The use of flash archives is a way to quickly and consistently build Solaris machines (as an alternative to using JumpStart). A flash archive can consist of everything you want to reside on your server (OS, additional packages, correct configuration of startup scripts/permissions, etc.) or it can be used to add files/configuration to your server.

Installation from a flash archive is quite simple:

1. Boot from the CD-ROM or the network.
2. Answer the necessary system configuration questions.
3. Choose Flash install, and the correct flash archive(s) to install.

This flash archive can be created with a recommended patch claster preinstalled, OpenSSH configured,  NTP  configured, etc.

The flash archive installations can also contain basic hardening with JASS.

you can create your own flash archives to install in addition to the base archive (see man flarcreate). You can also use flarcreate to create your own base images. The flash archive can live on an NFS server, an HTTP server or on local CD-ROM media. If you have a lot of machines to create, you may consider hosting the base flash archive locally to the subnet as that simplifies the installation from CD-ROM.

To create a local flash archive, setup a disk slice (say c0t0d0s7) with a filesystem (i.e., newfs), and mount it: mkdir /export/flash
mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7 /export/flash

To create a flash archive of the local system and name it (the name is arbitrary), run:

• The -x parameter is useful for excluding directories from the flash archive and can be repeated.

• The -c option turns on compression.

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20051209 : unixzone dot dk " Extracting files from a Flash Archive ( unixzone dot dk " Extracting files from a Flash Archive, Dec 9, 2005 )
• 20051209 : Clemson, Chris - CPIO with solaris 9 flash archives ( Clemson, Chris - CPIO with solaris 9 flash archives, )
• 20051209 : SUMMARY Flash Archive issues ( SUMMARY Flash Archive issues, )
• 20050622 : The Blog of Ben Rockwood ( The Blog of Ben Rockwood, Jun 22, 2005 )
• 20050622 : Rebuilding a sparc ( Rebuilding a sparc, )
• 20050622 : Sun blueprints/Building a Bootable DVD to Deploy a Solaris Flash Archive by John S. Howard ( Sun blueprints/Building a Bootable DVD to Deploy a Solaris Flash Archive, )
• 20050622 : Provisioning in Replicated, Mission-Critical Environments by Jay Daliparthy and James Falkner ( Provisioning in Replicated, Mission-Critical Environments, )
• 20021022 : Sun hails change management on Solaris by Paul Krill ( Sun hails change management on Solaris, Oct 22, 2002 )
• 210210 : BigAdmin Submitted Article Using Flash Archive in the Solaris Operating System for Disaster Recovery ( BigAdmin Submitted Article Using Flash Archive in the Solaris Operating System for Disaster Recovery, )

Old News ;-)

[Dec 9, 2005] unixzone dot dk " Extracting files from a Flash Archive

Clemson, Chris - CPIO with solaris 9 flash archives

Hi everyone!

I'm trying to get cygwin cpio to view/extract a flash archive made on solaris 9.

According to the docs, a flash archive is just a cpio archive. Reading the during the solaris install works fine, but I am having trouble getting cygwin cpio to view it:

E:\>cpio -ivF v240-disbox-v1-08-archive /etc/release
cpio: warning: skipped 90486 bytes of junk
cpio: warning: archive header has reverse byte-order
cpio: warning: skipped 188023 bytes of junk
cpio: warning: skipped 1360 bytes of junk
cpio: warning: skipped 146962 bytes of junk
cpio: premature end of file

E:\>

both the file and the drive I am reading it with work fine.
I can't say I've used cpio much, but the man pages say that it should recognise the format automatically.
any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
thanks,

chris

Re: CPIO with solaris 9 flash archives

• From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>
• To: cygwin at cygwin dot com
• Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 11:13:20 +0200
• Subject: Re: CPIO with solaris 9 flash archives
• References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
• Reply-to: cygwin at cygwin dot com

---

On May 19 17:44, Peter A. Castro wrote:
> On Wed, 18 May 2005, Clemson, Chris wrote:
> >E:\>cpio -ivF v240-disbox-v1-08-archive /etc/release
> >cpio: warning: skipped 90486 bytes of junk
> >cpio: warning: archive header has reverse byte-order
> >cpio: warning: skipped 188023 bytes of junk
> >cpio: warning: skipped 1360 bytes of junk
> >cpio: warning: skipped 146962 bytes of junk
> >cpio: premature end of file
>
> How did you get the file to your PC?  Did you FTP it?  Did you remember
> to use binary mode? As an experiment, I FTP'd a Solaris 8 CPIO file in
> ASC mode and ran cpio against it.  The results are similar to what you
> show above.

And just for the records, Solaris usually creates cpio archives which are
compatible with Cygwin.  The output of file shows:

Solaris$ find . | cpio -o > x.cpio
Cygwin$ file x.cpio
x.cpio: byte-swapped cpio archive

Solaris$ find . | cpio -oc > x.cpio
Cygwin$ file x.cpio
x.cpio: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)

I just tried it, out of curiosity.  Both variations are readable by
GNU cpio.

SUMMARY Flash Archive issues

Homan, Charles (NE) Charles.Homan at GDC4S.Com
Fri Aug 15 12:52:58 EDT 2003

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---

Thanks to Andrew Hay and Daniel Lorenzini for their responses.  Suggestions
from them and Sun support ranged from using JumpStart to putting the
archives on one of the hard disks in the machine.

Unfortunately, although we use JumpStart pretty extensively, I can't put a
JumpStart server on these particular machines.  The hard disk idea is a
pretty good one, although if the box goes up in smoke then it doesn't help
so much.  The "official" Sun support answer vis a vis having an archive
split over multiple CDs was: "...at this time there is no way to do this.
[The engineers] said they will revisit this in Solaris 10."  That makes
putting the archive on hard drive pretty attractive, and is the direction I
will be pursuing.

My other problem (with the unrecognized archive CD) was apparently that I
had written the CD with the archive down one level from the root of the CD.
Of course, the docs don't indicate that the archive has to be at the root
level, but when I re-wrote the CD with the archive at the root it worked as
expected.

My original question follows.

Regards,
/charles

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Homan, Charles (NE)
> Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 11:53 AM
> To: 'sunmanagers at sunmanagers.org'
> Subject: Flash Archive issues
> 







> 







> Greetings,
> 







> I have two Flash Archive issues.  The first is an
> installation problem.  The second is a production question.
> 







> 







> I am attempting to get a working configuration wherein I can
> boot from a CD, then install the system with a flash archive
> on a (different) CD.  I seem to have hit a roadblack.  I am
> using the Solaris 8 HW 2/02 media kit, as well as a Solaris 9
> media kit.  My Flash Archive is Solaris 8 HW 2/02 - although
> I'm not getting that far, so I doubt it matters. ;-)
> 







> There are two cases where the installation from CD doesn't
> work, and in both cases I am (*gasp*) following the
> instructions in the manual (Advanced Installation Guide, pp.
> 136-8.)  More's the fool me for reading the directions, I guess...
> 







> Case 1) Boot from the Webstart Installation CD, go through
> system ID, etc.  It re-boots from mini-kernel.  At the
> "Specify Media" panel I choose "CD-ROM".  The system ejects
> the Installation CD, and I put in my flash archive CD.  The
> system looks at it, and rejects it because it doesn't contain Solaris.
> 







> I have tried the Solaris 9 Webstart Installation CD, and it
> exhibits the same behavior.  I even tried to fake it out by
> telling it I had an FTP archive so it would let me choose
> other Flash Archives.  It gave me a second media selection
> panel for my "other Flash Archives", which behaved exactly
> the same as the "Specify Media" panel did.
> 







> Case 2) Boot from the software 1 of 2 CD with 'boot cdrom -
> w'.  Go through system ID, etc. to the point where I can
> choose the media for my Flash Archive.  I choose "local
> device", and follow the example on the screen to give it the
> path to my CD-ROM drive (/dev/dsk/c0t6d0s0) and the path on
> the CD to my archive.  It does not give me the chance to swap
> the CD, but just looks on the Software 1 of 2 CD for my
> archive, and - of course - can't find it.
> 







> The Flash Archive CD in question worked fine when booted from
> the network.  (Solaris 8 2/02 image, installed from the very
> CDs I am trying to boot the machine from.)  So I know the
> archive is readable, etc., I just can't get the installation
> program to look at it.
> 







> Am I doing something wrong?  Has anyone else seen this
> problem?  Is there a fix, or at least a workaround?
> 







> 







> 







> The second issue is, "How can I make a Flash Archive span
> multiple CD-ROMs?"  In the fully installed configuration
> (including tools, not data) we will be approaching 4 GB to
> archive, which even compressed will take up several CDs.  How
> do I go about this?  Do I need to split the archive, or can I
> somehow write on consecutive CDs?  (I don't see a way to do
> the latter with "cdrw".)  Sadly, the "target" machines won't
> have DVD drives on them, or I would just go that route.
> 







> 







> 







> Any help will be greatly appreciated, and I will summarize.
> 







> Regards,
> /charles
> 







> ObDisclaimer: Any opinions contained herein are mine and are
> not the property - or responsibility - of General Dynamics C4 Systems.
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers at sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers

[Jun 22, 2005] The Blog of Ben Rockwood Solaris Flash Archives: Protect your development box

If you've started to play with OpenSolaris you might have noticed that one of our constant concerns is turning your beloved development workstation into a brick. Brickification, or the result of a bad BFU (upgrade), can be painful. You have to remember that OpenSolaris is in fact the OS/Net conslidation of Solaris (and we call the Solaris 11 codebase we all now use Nevada, hence ONNV or OS/Net Nevada - thats OpenSolaris) is not simply the kernel like Linux but the whole base OS, from LibC to the tools, to the kernel, to the modules. On Linux if you build a bad kernel, no problem, reboot and select a diffrent kernel from GRUB or LILO and figure out what went wrong, but even on Linux if you jack up GNU LibC or the base toolset your gonna be reaching for a rescue or install CD. So when you upgrade a complete OpenSolaris system a lot is at stake. For the record, you can infact install only a kernel using the Install (pronounced Cap-Eye-Install) tool, but thats not nearly as much fun as upgrading the whole system via BFU. So, what we need is a way to protect our investment of time and effort. On Solaris we have two amazingly kick ass tools to help us solve this problem, and they become more important than ever in OpenSolaris development: Live Upgrade and Flash Archives.

I've actually written a paper on OpenSolaris development that covers both, but I haven't completed it yet and don't have time, so I'll blog it in request to several folks who are curious about it. I'd like to extend a hearty thank you to Mr. John S. Howard who is no longer with Sun (who ever decided that was a dipshit), who is the unquestioned Jumpstart, Live Upgrade, Flash Archive god of Solaris. John, you rule.

Live Upgrade (LU) and Flash Archive (Flar) are both essentially big ass wrapper around CPIO, and neither do anything that seems particuarly unusual at first look, they are both definately "Ya, of course!" tools, but the point is that no one else does it, at least not as well as they do.

Live Upgrade allows you to create a copy of your root disk onto another disk in the system, and then (the Live bit) upgrade that copy (which we call an Alternate Boot Enviroment, or ABE). When you finish patching or upgrading the ABE you simply activate the ABE and reboot into it. In this way you can do time consuming (a complete recommended patch cluster on Solaris9 for instance can take 3-4 hours to install) upgrades to Solaris without incurring any more downtime than it takes to reboot.

Flash Archives on the other hand are root disk images. You create a flash archive using the "flar" tool, which will output a single file containing your system image. We can use these system images in a variety of ways to provide a robust imaging and snapshot/backup solution. The reason Flash Archives are so much more polished than other solutions is the fact that when you run the Solaris Installer (from CD usually) you'll notice you actually are given 3 (or more) install options: Install, Upgrade, or Flash. When we create a Flash Archive we can store it on either an NFS, FTP or HTTP server and then access it again via a CD installer, as well as the fact that we can also use these archives via both JumpStart and Live Upgrade! When archives are installed onto a system they are done with the networking unconfigured (just like a sys-unconfig'ed system) making them great for imaging, just get a Solaris install how you like it, create the archive, then JumpStart install the archive onto your pool of servers, effortless rollouts!

For our purposes we're interested in simply creating point in time snapshots of our system. Flash Archives indeed could be cron'ed and made to act as a nightly backup solution, but there are certainly better tools for doing that. When you feel you've got your box the way you like you can use "flarcreate" to create a Flash Archive, which we can store in some place accessable via NFS, FTP or HTTP. If for some reason we destroy or extensively damage our installation for some reason we can just pop in the Install CD, enter the networking information and point the installer to the archive... minutes later we're booting back into our system. Every time I feel I've significantly improved or upgraded a system I cut an archive just in case.

Creating Flash Archives is easy. NFS provides the best method for archive storage, imho, so mount an NFS share locally, I prefer to mount to /flash. Then run run "flar create" with the appropriate arguments like this:

$ flarcreate -n "Monolyth B16 Snapshot" -a "[email protected]"
> -S -R / -x /flash /flash/Monolyth-Snapshot-`date '+%m-%d-%y'`.flar

So, looking at the arguments:

• -n adds a description to the archive (this is displayed during installation later)
• -a adds a string containing conact information
• -S tells flarcreate to skip its size checks, normally it will estimate the size of the archive prior to creating it, which can take a really really long time, this argument just lets us speed up the process
• -R specifies the root directory, by default its /, but I often supply it for completeness.
• -x specifies a directory to exclude from the archive, supply one -x per directory to exclude (ie: -x /opt -x /export). NFS mounted filesystems are excluded by default, but again for completeness I tend to put them in there anyway.
• (archivename).flar is the actual name of the output archive file. You can name it whatever you want, but typically its wise to put the hostname, archive creation date, and a .flar extention in the filename just to help identify it. The filename should be a absolute pathname, so since we've mounted our NFS archive repository to /flash, we'll specify that path.

If your not using NFS then you should create a directory to put the archive in and be sure to exclude (-x) that directory during creation before you move it to your FTP or HTTP server.

As you can see, Flash Archives are quick and easy methods of creation snapshot backups of your system. I used one just this morning! I needed a bigger IDE harddrive in Monolyth, so I created an archive last night before I left the office, then this morning I shutdown, pulled the old drive completely and put in the new one, booted the installation CD (Solaris Express: Community Release in this case), setup networking, partitioned the new drive, and then installed from my NFS archive, all from the graphical installer. An hour later the copy completed and the system rebooted. I didn't know anything had changed! I logged in and got back to work. Absolutely painless and I've got a faster disk with 70GB more space! :)

So, in the future as you play with OpenSolaris (or Solaris) and for whatever reason think that the system is good as it is, but you might want to reinstall it, or you want to see what rm -rf / does or whatever, don't worry, don't pull the drive and put it aside or mess with tapes, just create a Flash Archive and know that if you need to get back to where you were its only a quick install a way. Enjoy.

For more information check out:

• Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation)
• Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning
• Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations
• Using Live Upgrade 2.0 With JumpStart Technology and Web Start Flash[PDF] (BluePrint) by John S. Howard
• WebStart Flash[PDF] (BluePrint) by John S. Howard and Alex Noordergraaf
• Customizing JumpStart Framework for Installation and Recovery[PDF] (BluePrint) by John S. Howard and Alex Noordergraaf
• JumpStart Technology: Effective Use in the Solaris Operating Environment, the ultimate book discussing JumpStart, Flash, and LiveUpgrade by John S. Howard and Alex Noordergraaf, buy it online or at your local bookstore

Rebuilding a sparc

solaris jumpstart; solaris flash archives; solaris volume manager; Some rather
complex but robust Bourne shell scripts written by Gary Mitchell ...

Sun blueprints/Building a Bootable DVD to Deploy a Solaris Flash Archive -by John S. Howard

This article provides techniques to augment a DVD-ROM-based installation with the services and behaviors typically provided by a JumpStart server. The techniques presented in this article can be used when you need to perform an automated installation of a Solaris Flash archive, but are unable to use a JumpStart server. This article describes a procedure to create a bootable installation DVD-ROM with a complete software stack on a DVD that you can use to perform a standardized and fully automated installation of the software stack from the DVD.

This article also examines the structure of a bootable Solaris OS DVD and provides information about modifying installation behaviors to perform an automated install of a Solaris Flash archive from a DVD.

Provisioning in Replicated, Mission-Critical Environments by Jay Daliparthy and James Falkner

This article introduces the concepts and best practices for using Solaris Flash and Solaris Live Upgrade technologies to perform quick, consistent, controlled, and reproducible Solaris Operating Environment installations and upgrades. Creating, archiving, and deploying a Flash archive is covered along with how to create and manage multiple boot environments.

[Oct 22, 2002] Sun hails change management on Solaris By Paul Krill

SUN MICROSYSTEMS ON Tuesday introduced Sun Management Center Change Manager, which is provisioning software for installing, updating, and auditing software stacks on Sun Solaris systems.
The software dramatically reduces the time and expense of software upgrades and installations, according to Jonathan Han, senior product manager for systems management product marketing at Sun, in Los Angeles.

"Basically, this is a new installation and provisioning product that allows you to rapidly and easily provision Sun ONE software stacks or your own custom software stacks to various servers," Han said.

Users must first build a reference system for installs, which can take three to five hours. Then, it takes 15 to 30 minutes to upgrade multiple serves, Han said. "In the past, it would take a systems administrator on the average four to five hours to install or apply updates" for each server, Han said.

The product, which features a choice of either a browser-based or command-line interface, is based on Sun's Solaris Flash and LiveUpgrade technologies.

Key features of the product include:

* Archive Manager, for importing Flash Archives group into folders and deleting and searching for an archive.

* Target System Manager, to add a new server or group of servers.

* Configuration Writer, to manage server configuration profiles.

* Software Auditor, to create a software stack manifest of one or more deployed servers.

* Task Scheduler, to schedule service provisioning during offload hours.

The product costs $250 for a Managed Solaris Image RTU (Right to Use) license for Change Manager; $5,000 for a single Change Manager management server RTU license; or $50,000 for a single Change Manager Server RTU license for managing an unlimited number of managed Solaris images from a single management server.

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld.

BigAdmin Submitted Article Using Flash Archive in the Solaris Operating System for Disaster Recovery

Generic disaster recovery preparation for the UNIX platform includes maintaining the server's configuration details. For example, in the system information, you need to keep a hard copy of the method you are using for backup and restore. If you use ufsdump to back up the OS to locally attached tape drives, the information to keep includes all the backup file systems, the order of the file systems backed up, as well as information about the backup tape, OS level, patch level, disk partitions, file system layout, the third-party drivers, and so on.

The Solaris 9 and 10 OS releases provide a new installation function called flash installation. With flash installation, you can create a single reference installation of the Solaris OS on one system, called the master system. Then you can replicate that installation as a new installation on any number of systems, called cloned systems, that have the same architecture as the master system.

Although flash installation is designed to clone a master machine, I have done some tests and found it to be very useful for disaster recovery. This article shows what I did to back up the system using the flar command and then recover the system using the backup on the tape. This test used a Sun Enterprise 4000 server with the RSM Array 2000 disk system, running the Solaris 8 OS, with the latest cluster patch installed. There were two 16 Gbyte internal disks. One had the original OS installed and the other was used to test the recovery of the OS. A Digital Linear Tape (DLT) 7000 tape drive was connected to the machine.

SUMMARY JumpstartWebflash Images Dan Cave dan.cave at gmail.com
Thu Jan 27 05:40:24 EST 2005

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A belated thanks to Iain Millar, Daniel Nuqo and Dan O'Callaghan who kindly enlightend me to use the -S switch which doesn't spend time processing the flar archive size, along with some very useful information. I was also told that when recovering the flash images, the jumpstart server decompresses the image into swap/memory.

I managed to reduce the time from 2hr, 34mins -> 1hrs 35m just by using the -S switch., That was 30 minutes faster than using a traditonal dds4 tapedrive on scsi3.

Interestingly, the time it took to archive the 22Gb flash archive over 1Gb network directly to the sagita san from the client over nfs was exactly the same time writing to the JBOD raid 5 disk over Gbit NFS which was attached at the jumpstart server. (i'd be interested to hear you comments). Possibly a limiting factor of NFS?

Also, thanks to those of you, including Scott Cooper, who helped out with getting me sorted with my original flasharchive/jumpstart server and solaris2.6 questions.

You know who you are, thanks!!!

regards

dan.

My original post below with Dan's reply.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan O'Callaghan
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:05:34 +0000
Subject: Re: Jumpstart webflash image resore times.
To: Dan Cave <dan.cave at gmail.com>

Dan

You can save time with flarcreate by using the "-S" switch, stops it calculating the size.

I've never had flarcreate accurately calculate the image anyway, i think (could be very wrong here) but for this to work properly you need as much swap space as the size of the flar.

The boxes i create are usually about 2-3gig in size and when i create
the initial image, the swap is usually around 500M. I've noticed that is
spends about an hour trying to calculate the size of the flar and then
gives up and creates the image as if i had uses the "-S" switch.

When you restore the image, i always have the message "no size
information of the flar archive". I'm using Solaris 8 2/04.
One day i'll add a temp swap file to see if i'm right.

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 15:54 +0000, Dan Cave wrote:

> Hi all.,
>
> Previous to my last two emails, I thought I'd update you and ask for a
> bit of feedback.
>
> My orginal email asked if anyone knew whether it was possible to
> backup and restore solaris2.6 images created via flarcreate and
> restored via a jumpstart webflash archive on a solaris 8 box.
>
> Well, I successfully managed to build a jumpstart server (sol8) with
> flash image capability, recover the images after using Gbit ethernet
> point to point, and copying the flarcreate script to the 2.6 box,
> creating a 26Gb flar image(via a local nfs mount), which we usually
> store on a dds3/4 tape using ufsdump/ufsrestore.
>
> However, our usual tape resore takes just over two hours from a home
> rolled restore cd from which we boot.
>
> The restored flar image from jumpstart takes over two hours also,
> however I would have expected it to be quicker as I'm using Gbit
> ethernet.
>
> Has anyone had any experiences with restores from flar images which
> take roughtly the same ammount of time from tape? I've been
> enlightened that you cannot use compressed flash archives as they are
> purely for storage purposes.
>
> I was really looking to save time when creating and  restoring flar
> (FRU's as sun call them) images using jumpstart, but I'm a little
> bemused as to why this is so.... I had applied the 2Gb patch for
> restoring flar images and have a working system from which I created
> my 26Gb image. (a mix of OS data, applications and user data)
>
> It takes 2hrs 43 minutes to work out and create my flar image over a
> Gbit net, as I also believe that roughly 40% of this time is spent
> working out how large the image is going to be. Some editing of the
> script and adding in timing debug which I added in and created a flar
> archive of my jumpstart server to work this out.
>
> Has anyone else experienced similar behaviour?
>
> Feedback is most definitely appreciated. I shall summarise..
>
> Regards
>
> dan.
> _______________________________________________
> sunmanagers mailing list
> sunmanagers at sunmanagers.org
> http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers
--

Recommended Links

Softpanorama Recommended

Top articles

Sites

• Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation)
• Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning
• Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations
• Using Live Upgrade 2.0 With JumpStart Technology and Web Start Flash[PDF] (BluePrint) by John S. Howard
• WebStart Flash[PDF] (BluePrint) by John S. Howard and Alex Noordergraaf
• Customizing JumpStart Framework for Installation and Recovery[PDF] (BluePrint) by John S. Howard and Alex Noordergraaf
• JumpStart Technology: Effective Use in the Solaris Operating Environment, the ultimate book discussing JumpStart, Flash, and LiveUpgrade by John S. Howard and Alex Noordergraaf, buy it online or at your local bookstore

Sun blueprints/Building a Bootable DVD to Deploy a Solaris Flash Archive -by John S. Howard

This article provides techniques to augment a DVD-ROM-based installation with the services and behaviors typically provided by a JumpStart server. The techniques presented in this article can be used when you need to perform an automated installation of a Solaris Flash archive, but are unable to use a JumpStart server. This article describes a procedure to create a bootable installation DVD-ROM with a complete software stack on a DVD that you can use to perform a standardized and fully automated installation of the software stack from the DVD.

This article also examines the structure of a bootable Solaris OS DVD and provides information about modifying installation behaviors to perform an automated install of a Solaris Flash archive from a DVD.

Provisioning in Replicated, Mission-Critical Environments -by Jay Daliparthy and James Falkner

This article introduces the concepts and best practices for using Solaris Flash and Solaris Live Upgrade technologies to perform quick, consistent, controlled, and reproducible Solaris Operating Environment installations and upgrades. Creating, archiving, and deploying a Flash archive is covered along with how to create and manage multiple boot environments.

Sys Admin Introduction to SolarisTM Web Start Flash -John S. Howard

The Solaris 8 Operating Environment (OE) 4/01 release introduced the Solaris Web Start Flash extensions to the JumpStart framework. Web Start Flash extends the JumpStart framework by adding the mechanism to create a Flash archive, a system snapshot of the Solaris OE and all installed software, from a master machine. This archive can then be used to rapidly install client systems; this installation client may be any hardware platform capable of running the Solaris OE, including those hardware platforms typically referred to as "servers".

This article will explain how to identify the master machine as well as provide recommendations and examples of creating and administering Flash archives. This article assumes the reader has an understanding of basic Solaris OE or UNIX systems administration skills and a basic understanding of JumpStart technology and the Solaris OE installation procedure

[May 2005] BigAdmin Submitted Article Using Flash Archive in the Solaris Operating System for Disaster Recovery Joseph Gan

Generic disaster recovery preparation for the UNIX platform includes maintaining the server's configuration details. For example, in the system information, you need to keep a hard copy of the method you are using for backup and restore. If you use ufsdump to back up the OS to locally attached tape drives, the information to keep includes all the backup file systems, the order of the file systems backed up, as well as information about the backup tape, OS level, patch level, disk partitions, file system layout, the third-party drivers, and so on.

The Solaris 9 and 10 OS releases provide a new installation function called flash installation. With flash installation, you can create a single reference installation of the Solaris OS on one system, called the master system. Then you can replicate that installation as a new installation on any number of systems, called cloned systems, that have the same architecture as the master system.

Although flash installation is designed to clone a master machine, I have done some tests and found it to be very useful for disaster recovery. This article shows what I did to back up the system using the flar command and then recover the system using the backup on the tape. This test used a Sun Enterprise 4000 server with the RSM Array 2000 disk system, running the Solaris 8 OS, with the latest cluster patch installed. There were two 16 Gbyte internal disks. One had the original OS installed and the other was used to test the recovery of the OS. A Digital Linear Tape (DLT) 7000 tape drive was connected to the machine.

docs.sun.com Solaris 10 Installation Guide Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation)

Sun Microsystems Building a Bootable DVD to Deploy a Solaris Flash Archive

• By Sun Microsystems.
• Article is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall PTR.
• Date: Jun 18, 2004.

Solaris Tips and Tricks/Flash

• NOTE: Flash requires at least Solaris 8 4/01 and does not work well with DiskSuite/softpartitions.
• How to exclude multiple directories and filesystems without using the "-x" option for Web Start Flash Archives.
• Example of installing Web Start Flash Archives with the Solaris 8 interactive installation program. (CC)
• How to install Web Start Flash Archives on a Boot Environment using Live Upgrade (Command-Line) (CC)
• Infodoc on how to run Jumpstart with a "separate" boot and install server and utilizing a Flash Archive. (CC)
• Solaris 8 software Jumpstart with a Boot Server only utilizing Flash Archive (CC)
• How to install a Flash Archive from a CD-ROM. (CC)

docs.sun.com Solaris 9 Installation Guide

This chapter provides references to procedures for installing Solaris Flash archives on clone systems and procedures for administering an archive.

• "References to Procedures for Installing Solaris Flash Archives"
• "Administering Solaris Flash Archives"

You can use any of the Solaris installation methods to install Solaris Flash archives. For procedures for installing Solaris Flash archives, see the following references.

• Solaris Live Upgrade – See "Installing Solaris Flash Archives on a Boot Environment".
• The Solaris Web Start program – See "SPARC: Performing an Installation or Upgrade With the Solaris Web Start Program" or "IA: Performing an Installation or Upgrade With the Solaris Web Start Program".
• The Solaris suninstall program – See "SPARC: Performing an Installation or Upgrade With the Solaris suninstall Program" or "IA: Performing an Installation or Upgrade With the Solaris suninstall Program".
• Custom JumpStart installation program – See "Creating a Profile" and "To Prepare to Install a Solaris Flash Archive With a Custom JumpStart Installation".

The flar command enables you to administer archives. You can split an archive into sections. Those sections can be modified, added to, or deleted, and then merged to create an archive. You can also obtain information about the archive.

Caution - Do not modify the Archive Files section or you compromise the integrity of the archive.

You can split an archive into sections, which enables you to modify some sections, add new sections, or delete sections. After you have modified the sections, you need to merge the sections to create an new archive. For example, you might want to add a User-Defined section or modify the Archive Identification section. Do not modify the Archive Files section or you compromise the integrity of the archive.

The flar split command splits a Solaris Flash archive into sections. The flar command copies each section into a separate file in the current directory or specified directory. The files are named after the sections, for example, the archive cookie is saved in a file that is named cookie. You can specify that the flar split command save only one section. The syntax of the command is as follows:

flar split[-d dir] [-u section] [-f archive] [-S section] [-t [-p posn] [-b blocksize]] filename

-d dir	Retrieves the sections to copy from dir, rather than from the current directory
-u section	If you use this option, flar copies the Cookie, Identification, Archive, and section sections. You can specify a single section name or a space-separated list of section names. If you do not use this option, flar copies the Cookie, Identification, and Archive sections only.
-f archive	Extracts the Archive section into a directory that is named archive, rather than placing it in a file with the name archive
-S section	Only copies the section that is named section from the archive. This section is user-defined.

Example 19-1 Splitting an Archive

In the following example, archive1.flar is split into three files:

• cookie – The first line of the archive, which identifies the version of the archive format. Do not change this identifier.
• identification – A copy of the Archive Identification section with all keyword-value pairs.
• archive – The cpio archive itself. This file can be compressed.

# flar split archive1.flar

After the archive is split, you can modify the Archive Identification section or add a User-Defined section. The sections can then be merged to recreate the archive.

After you have split an archive into sections, you can combine the sections to create a new archive.

The flar combine command creates a Solaris Flash archive from individual sections. Each section is assumed to be in a separate file, the names of which are the section names. At a minimum, these three files must be present:

• Archive Cookie (cookie)
• Archive Identification (identification)
• Archive Files (archive)

When combining sections, remember the following points:

• If archive is a directory, flar uses cpio to archive the directory before including it in the combined archive.
• If the Archive Identification section specifies to compress the archive, flar compresses the contents of the newly combined archive.
• No validation is performed on any of the sections. In particular, no fields in the Archive Identification section are validated or updated.

flar combine [-d dir] [-u section] [-t [-p posn] [-b blocksize]] filename

-d dir	Retrieves the sections to combine from dir, rather than from the current directory.
-u section	If you use this option, flar copies the Cookie, Identification, Archive, and section sections. You can specify a single section name or a space-separated list of section names. If you do not use this option, flar copies the Cookie, Identification, and Archive sections only.

Example 19-2 Merging a Solaris Flash Archive

In this example, an Archive Cookie section, an Archive Identification section, and an Archive Files section are combined to become a complete archive. The archive is named

# flar combine newarchive.flar 

Example 19-3 Merging a Solaris Flash Archive and Adding a User-Defined Section

In this example, an Archive Cookie section, an Archive Identification section, an Archive Files section, and a User-Defined section are combined to become a complete archive. The archive is named newarchive.flar. The User-Defined section content is in the file that is named user-defined, which is in the current directory.

# flar combine -u user_defined newarchive.flar 

	
	

	
	

Extracting Information From an Archive

Use the flar info command to get information about archives you have already created. The syntax of the command is as follows:

flar info [-l] [-k keyword] [-t [-p posn] [-b blocksize]] filename

-k keyword	Returns only the value of the keyword keyword.
-l	Lists all the files in the archive section.

in this example, the file structure of the archive named, archive3.flar, is checked.

# flar info -l archive3.flar aaa aaa/bbb aaa/bbb/ccc aaa/bbb/ccc/ddd aaa/eee

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