Chapter 2 Solstice AutoClient 2.1

This chapter provides the following information for the Solstice AutoClient 2.1 product.

• "Supported Platforms"

• "Supported Operating Systems"

• "Disk Space Availability"

• "Required Software Packages"

• "AdminSuite and Patches"

Supported Platforms

The Solstice AutoClient 2.1 software used to set up AutoClient systems can be installed on the standalone or server systems described in Table 2-1.

Supported Operating Systems

Each operating system has various levels of support with AutoClient 2.1. The following sections describe the support available with each operating system.

Solaris 2.4 Systems

Before installing the Solstice AutoClient 2.1 software on a system running the Solaris 2.3 or Solaris 2.4 release, verify that the NFS mountd process is active with the following command.

# ps -ef | grep mountd

If the mountd process is not displayed in the output, start it by using this command.

# /usr/lib/nfs/mountd

Ensuring that the mountd process is running will prevent the installation script from hanging.

Solaris 2.3 End-of-Support

Support for Solaris 2.3 will be dropped from the next release of AdminSuite and AutoClient. Users running AdminSuite or AutoClient on systems running Solaris 2.3 should plan on upgrading the system to a new release during this transition period.

4.x Client Support

If you plan on having 4.x clients and your server is running a version of Solaris later than 2.5.1, you will need to manually install the SUNWhinst package that is now included on the Solstice AdminSuite 2.3 CD-ROM.

Disk Space Availability

To perform a full installation of the Solstice AutoClient 2.1 software on a Solstice station manager system, you need 35 Mbytes of free disk space for the spooled software area and an additional 7 Mbytes of disk space for each architecture (SPARC and x86). Type this command to find the amount of empty disk space.

% /usr/bin/df -k
Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t2d0s0     905070  239227  575343    30%    /
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0     288102  186690   72602    72%    /usr
/proc                      0       0       0     0%    /proc
fd                         0       0       0     0%    /dev/fd
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s1     201583   68385  113048    38%    /export
swap                   57840      12   57828     1%    /tmp

The avail column shows the number kilobytes of available disk space. In this example, the /export directory has 113048 Kbytes (approximately 113 Mbytes) free, more than enough to install the Solstice AutoClient 2.1 software (you can install the software in directory locations other than the /export directory).

A full installation is not required to use the Solstice AutoClient 2.1 software on each system. You can perform a full installation on one system, and use the installation program to set up other systems to access the Solstice AutoClient 2.1 software installed on this system.

Required Software Packages

Solstice AutoClient 2.1

The Solstice AutoClient 2.1 product verifies that the following software packages are installed on systems running the Solaris 2.5 or later operating environment:

• SUNWadmc

• SUNWadmfw

• SUNWsadml

• SUNWmfrun

The SUNWsadml and SUNWmfrun software packages are automatically installed on systems running the Solaris 2.3, Solaris 2.4, Solaris 2.5, or Solaris 2.5.1 release. For systems running a version later than 2.5.1, you must go back to the Solaris CD-ROM and install these packages before you can install Solstice AutoClient 2.1.

Removing Previously Installed AutoClient Software

If you have installed an earlier release of the Solstice AutoClient software, you must remove the old version prior to installing your new software. Refer to "Removing Previously Installed AutoClient Software" for information about how to remove this software.

sysadmin Group Membership

To run admin_install, you must be a member of the sysadmin group (group 14). Additionally, you must belong to the sysadmin group on each host you specify during installation.

AdminSuite and Patches

Support for automatically patching new diskless and AutoClient clients is now integrated into the AdminSuite and AutoClient tools. A command line interface, admclientpatch, is also provided to allow you to patch existing clients with one operation.

A small number of required patches for different releases of Solaris are shipped with the AdminSuite product. The appropriate patches will be applied as you create new clients. You can use the admclientpatch command to spool additional patches or you can remove patches from the spool area that you no longer need. However, you should be careful when removing one of the patches that is shipped with Solstice AutoClient 2.1 since new clients may not work properly if a required patch is missing.

Because patches are now applied automatically when a client is created, there are some additional things to be aware of. If you have existing clients, including dataless clients, that share the OS service with the new client, these existing clients will now also have the patch. You can use the admclientpatch command to be sure that all of the diskless and AutoClients also have the patch applied to their root filesystem. For dataless clients, you may need to go to each client and apply the patch to ensure that the dataless root is patched properly to match the shared OS service.

The disconnectable patch will also affect any dataless clients that use CacheFS(TM) and that share the OS service. The disconnectable patch will need to be applied to the dataless client's root for the client to work properly. The patches can be found in the spool area: /opt/SUNWadmd/Patches. The patch that needs to be applied to the dataless client root is shown in Table 2-2.

Slower Installations

Because of the integrated patching support that is now in the Host Management tools, adding AutoClients or diskless clients will take longer than in the previous release. This impact is due to the time needed to run installpatch for appropriate spooled patches. Once the client is created, there should be no noticeable performance difference from the earlier release.