Archives for nexenta category

Nexenta and third-party APT repositories

Posted on Apr 10, 2008 under nexenta | No Comment

NexentaOS has come a long way over the last year, and has recently released Nexenta Core Platform 1.0 which is considered stable. In doing so, the developers are providing a minimal core set of well tested packages somewhat akin to Debian’s netinst that can be used for building up servers or entire distributions. In fact, they’re encouraging this by providing a distribution builder. This opens up many possibilities for extending what you can do with the OS, and I hope to start experimenting with it soon to produce an updated XFCE4 desktop.

In the meantime, I’m making my experimental APT repository available. This is just a collection of packages I’ve had to compile over the last year or so to support work related projects. Some of these packages require manually patching and other changes to get compiled properly and I am remiss in getting these submitted upstream. My next goal is to get as many of these as possible (within the repository guidelines) into the official Nexenta APT repository and actually start maintaining some of them. Anyway, I hope some of these packages prove useful to others.

Jumpstart Nexenta GNU/OpenSolaris

Posted on Feb 05, 2007 under jumpstart, nexenta | 2 Comments

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.