Oracle Solaris 11 Express Automated Install: Default install

Following the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express last week, I took a cue from the The Fat Bloke's blog and decided to try out the new Automated Installer feature.  Being a n00b to Solaris installation I wanted to find a relatively painless path to installing Solaris.  Having imported the previous Solaris 10 update 8 VirtualBox image however,  I thought this would be a good challenge.

The Automated installer allows network-based installation of multiple systems in a fully automated manner. It relies on an Image Packing System (IPS) package management system to find the version and type of architecture (SPARC vs x86) required for installation.  You can customize the manifest files used to determine which packages you want installed.  The AI is also bootable, which allows for an automated local install without any interaction.  Just select the default install at the boot menu and it will initialize the installation and select the default IPS located at http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release.


In a nutshell - I just created a Solaris VirtualBox guest with 1 cpu, 768MB of memory and 16GB virtual disk.  I then downloaded the Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 Automated Installation
 iso from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html, booted it and selected the default install.  After about 75 minutes my Oracle Solaris 11 Express machine was ready.  I would recommend reading the documentation at this point.  However, being impatient and having self-induced ADD, I went ahead and tried to log in with the root username/password.  At some point I was asked for the root password and I took a guess at 'solaris' which worked.  At the GUI login screen I again attempted to login with root and 'solaris' but this kept giving me some weird message about roles.  Still refusing to read the documentation I extracted the installation iso and dug through the default.xml file which is the manifest used for the default install.  There I found the username 'jack' with what looked to be an encrypted password.   I decided to try jack as both username and password...and well it worked!  After login in I was greeted by the lovely desktop below.


Next I installed the guest additions for Solaris and that was it.   I would recommend changing all the passwords as soon as you login since these are obviously insecure inherent to 'default' installations.  At this point however, you could set up your own AI server using the newly installed guest and customize it for network installations.  As soon as I read the manual I will let you know how that goes ;) ...

Comments

  1. Deepesh Kumar March 8, 2011 at 2:23 AM

    Nice work !

    I had a solaris 11 automated install and ur blog was of great help !!

    keep up the good work !

    bye !

    Deepesh

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJune 20, 2011 at 8:48 PM

    Thanks for the info worked for me!

    ReplyDelete

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