Testing a Profile

After you create a profile, use the pfinstall(1M) command to test the profile before you actually use it to install or upgrade a system. Testing a profile is especially useful when you are creating upgrade profiles that reallocate disk space.

By looking at the installation output generated by pfinstall, you can quickly determine if a profile works as you intended. You can, for example, use the profile to determine if a system has enough disk space to upgrade to a new release of Solaris before you actually perform the upgrade on that system.

Ways to Test a Profile

pfinstall enables you to test a profile against:

• The system's disk configuration where pfinstall is being run.

• Other disk configurations by using a disk configuration file that represents a structure of a disk (for example, a disk's bytes/sector, flags, slices). Creating disk configuration files is described in:

  • SPARC: Creating Disk Configuration Files

  • x86: Creating Disk Configuration Files

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  Note –

  You cannot use a disk configuration file to test a profile you intend to use to upgrade a system. Instead, you must test the profile against the system's actual disk configuration and the software currently installed on that system.

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Overview of Testing a Profile

To test a profile for a particular Solaris release successfully and accurately, you must test a profile within the Solaris environment of the same release. For example, if you want to test a Solaris 8 initial installation profile, you have to run the pfinstall command on a system running Solaris 8.

However, if you want to test a Solaris 8 upgrade profile on a system running a previous version of Solaris, or if you don't have a Solaris 8 system installed yet to test Solaris 8 initial installation profiles, you need to create a temporary installation environment by:

• Booting a system from a Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 SPARC Platform Edition or Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 Intel Platform Edition CD image

• Responding to system identification questions

• Selecting the Solaris 8 Interactive Installation Program as the program to install Solaris 8

• Exiting out of the first screen that's displayed.

• Executing the pfinstall command from the shell.

Syntax of pfinstall

This is the syntax of the pfinstall command you use to test a profile:

# /usr/sbin/install.d/pfinstall disk_configuration [[-c path]] profile

To Test a Profile

1. Locate a system on which to test the profile that is the same type of platform (SPARC or IA) for which the profile was created.

   If you are testing an upgrade profile, you must test it on the actual system that you intend to upgrade.

2. Use the decision table below to determine what to do next.

   If you	Then
   Need to test an initial installation profile and have a system running Solaris 8	Become superuser on the system and go to Step 9.
   Need to test an upgrade profile, or you don't have a system running Solaris 8 to test an initial installation profile	Go to Step 3.

3. Boot the system from a Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 SPARC Platform Edition or Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 Intel Platform Edition CD image, either from the system's local CD-ROM drive or from an install server.

   Chapter 11, Using the Solaris 8 Interactive Installation Program contains additional information about booting a system.

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   Note –

   If you are testing an upgrade profile, boot the system that you are going to upgrade.

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4. If prompted, respond to the system identification questions.

5. If you are presented with a choice of installation methods, select Solaris Interactive Installation.

6. Exit from the first screen of the Solaris 8 Interactive Installation Program.

   After the Solaris 8 Interactive Installation Program exits, a shell prompt is displayed.

7. Create a temporary mount point:

   # mkdir /tmp/mnt

8. Mount the directory that contains the profile(s) you want to test:

   If you want to	Then type
   Mount a remote NFS file system (for systems on the network)	mount -F nfs server_name:path /tmp/mnt
   Mount a UFS-formatted diskette	mount -F ufs /dev/diskette /tmp/mnt
   Mount a PCFS-formatted diskette	mount -F pcfs /dev/diskette /tmp/mnt

9. To test the profile with a specific system memory size, set SYS_MEMSIZE to the specific memory size in Mbytes:

   # SYS_MEMSIZE=memory_size # export SYS_MEMSIZE

10. Did you mount a directory in Step 8?

    • If yes, change directory to /tmp/mnt:

      # cd /tmp/mnt

    • If no, change directory to where the profile is located, which is usually the JumpStart directory:

      # cd jumpstart_dir_path

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    Caution –

    In the following step, you must include the -d or -D option (represented by disk_configuration), or pfinstall actually uses the profile you specify to install Solaris 8 and subsequently overwrites all the data already on the system.

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11. Test the profile with the pfinstall(1M) command:

    # /usr/sbin/install.d/pfinstall disk_configuration [[-c path]] profile

Example–Testing a Profile

The following example shows how to use pfinstall to test a profile named basic_prof against the disk configuration on a system on which Solaris 8 is installed. The basic_prof profile is located in the /jumpstart directory, and the path to the Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 SPARC Platform Edition or Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 Intel Platform Edition CD image is specified because Volume Manager is being used.

# cd /jumpstart
# /usr/sbin/install.d/pfinstall -D -c /cdrom/pathname basic_prof

The following example shows how to use pfinstall to test the profile named basic_prof on a Solaris 8 system against the 535_test disk configuration file and 64 Mbytes of system memory. This example uses a Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 SPARC Platform Edition or Solaris 8 Software 1 of 2 Intel Platform Edition CD image located in the /export/install directory.

# SYS_MEMSIZE=64
# export SYS_MEMSIZE
# /usr/sbin/install.d/pfinstall -d 535_test -c /export/install basic_prof