Questions and Answers

Amy Rich

Q We have a bunch of Sun machines that we install via Jumpstart. When a new version of Solaris comes out, we download the ISO images and build a new Jumpstart image from them. Since new versions only come out four times a year, it isn't too painful to do this by hand. Lately, though, we've been exploring Solaris 10 via Solaris Express as well as keeping up with the latest production releases. It's become annoying to install each set of disk images by hand now that we do it so frequently. I was wondering whether someone had already written a script to accomplish this before we attempted to (re)invent the wheel.

A Because I regularly build Jumpstart servers for various clients, I came up with a script some time back that does everything but download the ISO images for you (see Listing 1). The script is under a BSD-style license, so feel free to modify and distribute it as described.

Q We have a newly installed HP/UX 11.00 machine on our network. After a few minutes of uptime, it suddenly falls off the network. If the machine is rebooted, it gets another few minutes of connectivity. As far as I can tell, the configuration is fine and there's nothing running from cron or at that would kill the connection. I realize that this question is thin on details, but I'm really at a loss here.

A Without some debugging details (output from netstat, ndd, ps, tcpdump, etc.) it's difficult to make an accurate diagnosis. My first guess would be that your HP machine is performing Dead Gateway Detection and cannot ping the gateway.