I missed a few months of LOSUG due to one thing and another so was looking forward to Andrew Watkin’s talk on ‘Solaris 11 Automated Installer Walkthrough’. As usual, an engaging and interesting talk! I hadn’t even realised that Jumpstart was dead, as it quickly transpired in the talk. Jumpstart, Jet, building servers in general was my ‘specialist subject’ for a large part of my Unix sysadmin career. It made me realise how out-of-date my Solaris skills were becoming, not having used it on a daily basis for, well a few years. The last major piece of Solaris work I did was the build engineering for a Solaris 10 rollout and that was all done with Jet and flars.
This new ‘AI’ system in Solaris 11 does seem like work still in progress, although it has been around since 0609. ‘What about images?’, I asked, only to find that no equivalent of flar’s existed in Solaris 11. I really must install some Solaris 11 on my home lab!
P.S. I downloaded the llive DVD and started an install from it. The first stage of the install is transferring cpio files. Perhaps there’s life in the old flar yet!