Reinstall Solaris 10 on a T2000

written by admin on July 28th, 2006 @ 10:25 AM

My biggest gripe with the T2000 so far is actually with Solaris package management. pkgadd sucks because it does not handle dependencies and will not automagically download stuff from Sun. I really which they had something like the FreeBSD ports collection or apt-get or yum or something which automatically downloaded and install dependencies.

The T2000 ships (the one I received atleast) with Solaris 10 1/06 release. I want to play with ZFS which was included in the 6/06 release. Plus, I hope installing some of the other packages will be easier if I install the developer packages with some amount of libraries.

So not being able to find out how to upgrade the system from 1/06 to 6/06, I downloaded the 6/06 release and am doing a reinstall.

Since the T2000 does not ship with a video card, you have to install from the console. Not having used Solaris very much , it took a little while to figure out how to get the box to boot from the cdrom.

The trick is to get to the ok> prompt. You can do this by logging in as root on the console and issuing the following command:

shutdown -y -g0 -i0 now 

This leaves the server running but in init mode 0.

Now, you can boot from the cdrom and start the installer with the following command.

ok boot cdrom - nowin

This will start the installer in the console mode, rather than in X.

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