At a previous job, we had a combined Solaris Jumpstart and RedHat Kickstart server to install new systems. Now that I’ve moved on from that position, I decided I needed to reproduce that functionality — with a few differences:
- Support for Solaris x86 from the beginning
- FreeBSD support
- Using DVD iso for the install source
- DHCP for all systems (it used bootp for Solaris SPARC installs)
- CentOS 5.4 Linux as the server
It is interesting having a CentOS server while doing a Solaris 10 u8 install. You can find many posts which say to turn off NFSv4 on the client. I did this via:
RPCNFSDARGS="--no-nfs-version 4"
to the /etc/sysconfig/nfs config file, but that was not sufficient. This fix worked fine for a previously installed Solaris 10 system, but it did not work for the Jumpstart client. I also had to tell rpc.mountd not to mention NFSv4, even though in the rpcinfo -p output it was not listed:
RPCMOUNTDOPTS="--no-nfs-version 4"
This second change made the install happier except when the client tried to mount the sysid_config partition. The Jumpstart client would ask for all the information which is contained on the partition. Furthermore, I saw the following errors on the console:
NFS server 192.168.1.3 not responding. NFS server 192.168.1.3 OK.
And in the Linux server logs, I found this error message:
kernel: svc: unknown version (4 for prog 100003 nfsd)
Seems the Jumpstart client insists on using NFSv4 even though I have it turned off. When I downgrade to Solaris 10 u7, the install works flawlessly. This proves to me that it is a Jumpstart client problem.