Howtos Sun External CDROM

From 5dollarwhitebox.org Media Wiki

1 Summary
2 Preparation
3 The Process
4 Resources

Summary

As it took me quite some time to figure this one out, I'm putting it up here. Its fairly basic, however since I am no Solaris guru... it took some figuring out. Basically, the high rollers have the bills to buy a server with a CDROM *in* the server, attached to the internal interface. When that is the case, all you need to do in order to start a CD installation is type "boot cdrom". However, when you are ghetto and have to hook up an ancient 4x SCSI cdrom in order to install, its not quite as simple. This here would be your un-informative... down and dirty... not alot of explanation... howto on the subject.

Author: BJ Dierkes
Last Updated: Sometime in 2005
Contact: wdierkes [at] 5dollarwhitebox [dot] org

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Preparation

This HowTo shall assume that you already have a working Sun box (v120 in this example), an external SCSI CDROM, and Installation Media. I can't go too indepth with the significance of commands and such, as I probably wouldn't be able to tell you anything useful.

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The Process

Ok, so the problem is that when you try to install from CDROM on a sun box, its going to want to boot to "cdrom" which is an alias to the internal CDROM.... and most likely will not have an alias for the external CDROM. This howto will basically be showing you how to setup an alias to point to your external cdrom.

Run the following command at the Open Boot Prompt and take note of the output for the "Removable Read Only Device" or whatever it calls your CDROM

ok probe-scsi-all

/pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8,1
Target 0
Unit 0     Removable Read Only Device     Toshiba CDROM

/pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8
Target 0
Unit 0   Disk   Seagate <model>   0007

... etc

As you can see, the command 'probe-scsi-all' has detected our external SCSI CDROM as '/pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8,1' . This path is actually NOT complete. If you notice the "Target 0" and "Unit 0" above, we actually need to tack that on to the end of the path... with an additional ":f" as well. (I can't explain that one). If you consider "Target 0" as "X" and "Unit 0" as "Y", then our full path will be '/pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8,1/disk@X,Y:f' .

Sure, this is confusing and makes things a bit difficult to have to type such a long path for a device. At this point you could not-so-easily type "boot /pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8,1/disk@0,0:f' and the system would boot to that device. But what if you have to do this a few times.... wouldn't it be so much easier to create an alias of 'cdrom1' Of course, and so we will.

ok nvalias cdrom1 /pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8,1/disk@0,0:f

And now we have a new alias called 'cdrom1' which points to the physical device '/pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8,1/disk@0,0:f'. All we need to do is boot to it.