Solaris Flash Archive Sections

Solaris Flash archives contain at least three sections. The sections include sections that identify the archive and the actual files that were copied from the master system.

1. Archive Cookie section – The first section of a Solaris Flash archive contains a cookie that identifies the file as a Solaris Flash archive. The cookie must be present for an archive to be valid.

2. Archive Identification Section – The second section contains keywords with values that provide identification information about the archive. You are required to specify a name for the Solaris Flash archive. Other information that you can specify about the archive includes:

   • The author of the archive

   • The date that the archive was created

   • The name of the master system that you used to create the archive

   For a list of keywords that describe the archive, see “Identification Section Keywords”.

3. User–Defined sections – Following the Archive Identification Section, you can define and insert sections. The Solaris Flash archive does not process any sections that you insert. For example, this section could contain a description of the archive or perhaps a script to check the integrity of an application.

   In a User-Defined section, you can also define keywords. The Solaris Flash archive ignores user-defined keywords, but you can provide scripts or programs that process the Identification section and use these keywords.

   The User-Defined section requires the following format.

   User-Defined sections	Must be line oriented Must terminate with newline (ASCII 0x0a) characters Can have unlimited length of individual lines Encode binary data by using base64 or a similar algorithm.
   User-Defined keywords	Must begin with X. X-department is a valid user-defined keyword. Can contain any characters other than linefeeds, equal signs, null characters, and forward slashes (/).

4. Archive Files Section – The Archive Files Section contains the files that were saved from the master system.

You can use the flar command to retrieve information about the archive. For detailed instructions, refer to “Extracting Information From an Archive”.