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1. (Q) What Pre-installed Solaris product is on which machines 

(A)

2. (Q) What Solaris version is the minimum supported for each server 

(A)

3. (Q) What is the Solaris part number for ordering media 

(A)

NOTE 1: For each Solaris version listed above that only shows an "M", can also be ordered in a different format by replacing the "M" with either:

NOTE 2: Solaris 8 HW 7/03 System Administrator's media kit can be used to install the Solaris 8 Operating Environment on the following Sun hardware platforms:

4. (Q) Why do some systems come with pre-installed Solaris and others do not

(A) The pre-installed Solaris is provided for those simpler systems to enable rapid installation and setup at the customer site, to bring up new systems in under 1 hour, including rack and cabling time for experienced system installers. The systems which do not ship a pre-installed Solaris are larger systems for which the customer wants to spend some time customizing the system before bringing it up into production, over hours or days. The options available for each server model is determined by product marketing based on customer feedback.

5. (Q) What does "PBI-only" mean 

(A) Pre-Boot Image is a special mini-root only installation of Solaris kernel, that is designed to dynamically find either a jump-start server for network installation, or a valid Solaris DVD/CDROM media for media installation. See question 2 above for which versions are valid supported versions for the specific server you are using. The PBI is a one-time-use only image that is applied to internal disk 0 at the factory, and runs on first power-on out of the box, and is used so that the OBP firmware "boot-device" variables do not need to be changed by the factory. This image is not pre-installed Solaris and cannot be used as a normal Solaris installation, it is only to allow finding the correct Solaris image to start a full Solaris install for the new system.

6. (Q) What do I do if the "PBI-only" one-time fails 

(A) Use the OBP firmware "ok" prompt to manually select either:

7. (Q) If on the systems that do have pre-installed Solaris, but I chose not to use it, and instead are using jump-start or DVD/CDROM, what is the meaning of the message "cannot open /kernel/sparv9/unix" after I have successfully completed Solaris installation 

(A) This is normally caused by installing a Solaris version that is earlier than the minimum version with the required platform and kernel drivers to support that system. The kernel that has been installed does not recognize the system and CPU and is unable to load or find an appropriate kernel that does recognize the system. For example, you will see this message if you try to install Solaris 8 HW 2/02 on a Sun Fire V210 server that does not have platform/kernel support until Solaris 8 HW 12/02. See question 2 above for which versions are valid supported versions for the specific server you are using.

8. (Q) Are the dual S8 & S9 images on the SF280R pre-installed image truly dual-boot 

(A) No. There are 2 flash images stored on the backup partition 2, containing the 2 Solaris versions, and the user on initial power-up chooses which they will be using by default. After this one-time selection, the disk is partitioned into "/" root, swap and "/space" appropriately and the flash image chosen is copied into the appropriate install structure, overwriting the other flash image in the process.  

9. (Q) How do I make my server truly dual-boot 

(A) Simply install any other supported version of Solaris on a different disk than the already installed version on the boot disk. Then use the OBP firmware "boot-device" variable, in conjunction with the "auto-boot " variable, to choose which disk (Solaris) to boot from.

The following questions apply only to those with Pre-installed Solaris Images:

10. (Q) What does the message "This system is not yet configured. Rebooting from disk:b " mean during power-on of a new system 

(A) There is also a PBI-only sector on the pre-installed disk that allows the system administrator to start installing from a pre-configured jump-start network installation or from a local DVD/CDROM media installation if found. If neither are found, then the pre-install image will be used to configure the system. This message is confirmation that no other installation method was available, so the system will by default start configuring using the pre-install image. This message is normal if you intend to use the pre-install image. "disk:b" is used for the Solaris 8 single-boot image, and "disk:f" is used for the Solaris 8 & 9 dual-boot image.

11. (Q) What happens after the reboot when using the pre-install image 

(A) After booting its mini-root, the pre-install image will ask for which version of Solaris you wish to install if it is a dual-boot image, then ask all the standard Solaris configuration questions (and on SF280R RSC configuration questions) for the server, reboot and away you go. Total time taken from power-on to login prompt (i.e. time to answer the questions and reboot) is less than 5 minutes for most experienced system administrator's who already know the answers for the Solaris configuration questions that this specific server will be using in their environment.

12. (Q) What do I do if the "Pre-installed Solaris" installation process fails 

(A) If something goes wrong during the configuration scripts or copying of the flash images onto the disk, then the background image is normally corrupted and no longer useable. To recover requires restarting Solaris installation from either local DVD/CDROM media or network jump-start installation.

If the failure is caused by the disk, and the disk is replaced, there is no FRU that contains the Pre-install Solaris image on it. There is a way that the customer can still use the pre-install rather than standard DVD/CDROM install or network jump-start, but it requires they recopy the pre-install Solaris image using the "re-preinstall" command in the "/cdrom/cdrom0/s0/Solaris_8 or Solaris_9/Tools/Boot/usr/sbin/install." directory after booting from a DVD/CDROM or network in single-user mode. Using this method, they will get a copy of that Solaris version on "disk:b" which they can then reboot and install with, but it will not have any additional software or dual-boot option. It is preferred to simply start a fresh install from the local media or network jump-start rather than going through this extra step.

See question 2 above for the minimum supported version for the specific server you are using, and question 3 above for the part number to order the required version of media if necessary.

13. (Q) So from question 10, is the pre-install image the 3^rd selection in order by default, and not the 1^st selection to use for the Solaris installation of a new system 

(A) Yes. If no Solaris install CD/DVD is in the DVDROM drive, and no jump-start server is found on the network, the pre-installed image is the 3rd default, only on first power-on. If the CD/DVD or net install are found on first power-on, they will install automatically, overwriting the pre-installed Solaris image and making it no longer accessible or useable. After the first power-on, if the pre-install image was used and then had failed during install, this is the same answer as for question 12  "If the pre-install fails during the install process."

14. (Q) Although "disk:b" does not exist, is OBP "boot-device" parameter changed into "disk:b" from "disk net" 

(A) From the factory the system OBP "boot-device" parameter is setup to boot from "disk:b" or "disk:f" (see question 10) upon initial power-on. This is just a temporary implementation detail simply to achieve installation of  Solaris from wherever it can find it, and gets overwritten by the initial Solaris installation. This is not a permanent change, and it is how the system OBP finds the PBI and pre-install images on first power-on, in order to boot them and start the Solaris installation process. Normally the OBP "boot-device" parameter setting is reset to the normal "disk net" setting automatically after the Solaris configuration questions and prior to the reset that then boots to the "login:" prompt.

15. (Q) There seems to be a lot of software installed on my system that I do not recognize. Exactly what has been installed on my system, what things do I not need, and how do I get rid of them 

(A) Solaris entire distribution, languages packages (many Asian language conversion packages), Netscape.

On SF280R only, the following additional packages are installed:

On SF V250, the following comprises the "Office Essentials" software stack:

Exactly what is needed and what is not, is entirely up to the customer, and they can use either the Solaris Management Console, admintool, or pkgrm to remove anything they do not wish to use. Alternatively, they can re-install Solaris with the appropriate custom packages and cluster that the customer does want.

16. (Q) What is the Wnn6 Key License Server (that displays a message every time I boot), and how do I uninstall it 

(A) Wnn6 is a server that does Japanese kana-kanji language conversions.  It is a commercial product developed by the Omron Software Co. This is included with the pre-installed image because Solaris must include support for all the supported language locales. It can be uninstalled using either Solaris Management Console (formerly admintool) or the pkgrm command. The packages for this product are:

SUNWjwncu, SUNWjwncr, SUNWjwncx, SUNWjwndt, SUNWjwnsr and SUNWjwnsu.

17. (Q) What is the Nihongo Multi Client Server (that displays a message every time I boot), and how do I uninstall it 

(A) Nihongo Multi Client Server is a message produced by Wnn6. You can remove it by removing Wnn6.

18. (Q) What is metainit (that displays a message every time I boot), and how do I uninstall it 

(A) metainit is a command used to configure disks for Solstice DiskSuite[TM]. It is found in the SUNWmd package. You should never uninstall it (it is now part of regular solaris distribution) unless you truly know you do not need or wish to use it now or in the future.

19. (Q) What is cssd (that displays a message whenever I reboot), and how do I uninstall it 

(A) This is another Asian language support server.  

/etc/init.d/loc.*.cssd stop /etc/css.conf

It's part of the SUNWjfpr package, you can uninstall it by removing the package with:

pkgrm SUNWjfpr

in which case you need to remove the rest of the Japanese language packages.

20. (Q) What is fgd (that displays a message whenever I reboot), and how do I uninstall it 

(A) This file comes with the Chinese Solaris CD with the Taiwanese locale. It is run by "/etc/rc2.d/S90solaris"

To uninstall, remove the Taiwanese language support packages.

21. (Q) What is the htt_server that is running on my port 9010   Is it secure   How do I uninstall it 

(A) This is the input method server (IM Server) for Chinese input. The server is started by the "/usr/openwin/bin/htt" command.  This can be found in the SUNWxim package, to uninstall remove the package with:

pkgrm SUNWxim

SUNWuxlcf and SUNWuxlcx depend on it, so you need to remove them too.

22. (Q) Why do I keep getting vold messages about problems unmounting /vol when I shut down   How do I make them stop 

(A) The messages come from vold which is the volume manager daemon that manages removable media.  The message means it is attempting to unmount a cdrom or dvdrom media that is inserted in the system, or was inserted but has since been ejected prior to shutdown, but the mount table still shows it as present.  

If the only symptom is the message, it can be safely ignored. However, if the system hangs, or if you would like to eliminate the message, do the following:

23. (Q) Why has the disk been partitioned in such a way that the system is not very usable 

(A) The partitioning provides slices needed for DiskSuite, in addition to providing maximum amount of data space available for customer data files. The root "/" and "/space" partitions are contiguous, so the root filesystem can grow. There is no one-way to partition a disk to please everyone and their different operating philosophies.

24. (Q) Is there any way to re-partition my system without having to re-install Solaris 

(A) Any of the following methods could be used:

25. (Q) Okay, I give up.  How do I re-install Solaris onto my system 

(A) You can re-install Solaris onto the disk using either a jump-start or webflash archive network installation or using the appropriate version of Solaris

DVD/CDROM media for a local media installation. See question 2 above for the minimum supported version for the specific server you are using, and question 3 above for the part number to order the required version media if necessary.

26. (Q) I am using the pre-installed Solaris image, and I've been running fine for weeks. Today, a system administrator accidentally corrupted the Solaris libraries and I'm trying to recover. How do I recover or re-install the pre-installed Solaris image 

(A) There is no support for the pre-installed Solaris image, and it is not available on a special DVD/CDROM for recovery. To recover, restore the system from the most recent backup media you have kept.

If you have no backup, the only alternative is to do a full re-install of Solaris  using either a jump-start or webflash archive network installation or using the appropriate version of Solaris DVD/CDROM media for a local media installation.  In addition, you will now need to re-load your data, applications and specific server configuration information. Best practices are to keep a regular backup and mirror the boot disks using the pre-installed DiskSuite.

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