Jumpstart Nexenta GNU/OpenSolaris

Nexenta currently lacks the ability to do automated network based installs via Jumpstart. The recent alpha6 version added KickStart ability, but it’s limited to CD based installs as far as I know. I am in the process of deploying multiple production machines at work and wanted to leverage my existing Jumpstart framework. I’ve managed to come up with a working solution that involves a Jumpstart begin script and debootstrap. All that’s really necessary for this is a standard SX:CR jumpstart miniroot, DHCP and TFTP server. My script extracts a tarball and does everything necessary to setup the debootstrap environment, all without modifying the miniroot. In addition to the jumpstart, I also use BCFG2 as a configuration management tool within the new chroot’ed environment so the system comes up pre-installed for its given purpose.

This is still quite hackish, but I intend to clean it up and hopefully make a .deb package that will ease the setup. It should be possible to do away with the SX:CR miniroot requirement and have a native Nexenta jumpstart miniroot instead.