Possible Causes for Distribution and Deployment Failure

OS deployments might fail or fail to complete if any of the following conditions occur:

• The target RSC technology server was not powered off before discovery was run. RSC servers must remain powered off until discovery is complete and discovery has been confirmed by using the show server command. See RSC Servers Must Be Powered Off for Discovery to Succeed.

• Partitions are not modified to suit a Sun Fire V40z or SPARC V440 server. See To Modify the Default Solaris OS Profile for a Sun Fire V40z or a SPARC V440 Server in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Operating System Provisioning Guide.

• Scripts are not modified to install the driver needed to recognize the Ethernet interface on a Sun Fire V20z server. See To Modify a Solaris 9 OS Profile for a Sun Fire V20z Server With a K2.0 Motherboard in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Operating System Provisioning Guide.

• DHCP is not correctly configured. See Solaris OS Deployment Job Times Out or Stops.

• OS profiles that install only the Solaris OS Core System Support will fail to deploy. The entire Solaris OS distribution must be deployed.See Solaris OS Profile Installation Fails.

• The target server cannot access DHCP information or mount distribution directories. See Invalid Management Server Netmask.

• The management server cannot access files during a Load OS operation. See Restarting NFS to Resolve Boot Failed Errors.

• The Linux OS deployment stops. See Linux OS Deployment Stops.

• The Red Hat OS deployment fails. See Red Hat Linux OS Profile Creation Fails.

• If OS deployment still fails, the problem might be the managed server. Perform the following steps to troubleshoot the managed server.

  Refer to the managed server documentation for the server-specific access methods and BIOS access commands.

  1. Access the service processor of the managed server by using Telnet, SSH, or by opening the serial console.

  2. Access the managed server BIOS. The command used to access the server BIOS depends on the type of server and its service processor type.

  3. Enter the BIOS command required to power-cycle the managed server. Make sure that the power-on self test completes correctly, and that the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) boot starts.

  4. Check whether the OS profile specifications for disk partitions, resources, and scripts are configured correctly.

  5. Redeploy the OS distribution to the managed server and monitor the deployment process.

  6. Verify whether the deployment was successful by listening for DHCP broadcasts from the managed server ETH0 and ETH1 ports by doing a network packet dump using the operating system specific tools such as snoop, tcpdump, or ethereal.