Building a Sun boot tape.

[John Chambers]

Well, I tried this in comp.sys.sun, which is moderated, and the
mail has just bounced back to me (several times, even ;-), so I
thought I'd go to the real experts...

A situation has come up where it'd be read nice to be able to
build a Sun boot tape.  The Sun manuals don't seem to cover this.
Does anyone know how to do it?

The scenario is a client who has a "turnkey" system that is in
an unknown initial state, and we'd like to send a tape that can
install a standard set of stuff.  The users at the system are
likely to be real dummies when it comes to computers, and they
aren't stongly motivated to become Sun hackers.  Imagine your
typical army enlisted fellow, and you have about the right sort
of image. 

We can get at the EPROMs in the boxes before delivery, and we
believe that we can set them up so that they will first attempt
to boot from tape, if that exists and contains a bootable file
system, falling back to disk if the tape isn't bootable.  The
idea then is that the recipient of a tape could just insert it
in the drive, turn on the machine, and watch it load itself.

It'd be easy enough to put invocations of our own programs into
/etc/rc.boot, and we'd be off and installing.  In extreme cases,
we could even put our own proxy in for /etc/init, which would do
its thing, then do a couple of renames to install the real init,
and exec it.  That's elementary for a Unix hacker.  The problem
is how we get our stuff into a bootable tape, which is obviously
not in the usual tar or cpio formats.

I expect my mailbox to fill up with scripts from people wanting
to show off their expertise...

-- 
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All opinions Copyright 1989 by John Chambers; for licensing information contact:
	John Chambers <{adelie,ima,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)