Star Systems - Installation

The following are Solaris 2.x installation tips for general workstation and server installs.

Back to Tech Resource Center

Partitioning Tips
Installing Solaris

Partitioning System Disk
There have been many ways, in the past, to partition the system boot disk. These variations have come about for many reasons including disk performance, file system management and others. Recently though, partitioning the system disk is quite straight forward to setup and easy to maintain. Especially with the speed of hard disks at the present, only speeding up in the future, the suggestion of many small partitions is not necessary in most system configurations.

In most cases, the partitioning of the system disk is simply to create a single partition. The only time not to follow this guideline is when instructed to do so by some application with very specific requirements, such as some relational databases. These applications usually require partitioning to be specific to its needs, including, creating raw disk partitions as well as file system partitions. Some other applications, which require huge amounts of disk space to operate, may also suggest to create separate file systems aside from the main root file system so as not to, possibly cause, a system crash when the root file system reaches its maximum capacity. Therefore, except for those special cases when the application will instruct otherwise, I will suggest a single partition for constructing a system or boot disk to which the OS will be installed.

The benefits of single disk partitions is small but enticing to the administrator. File system maintenance, such as performing regular system backups and restores after a catastrophic event, is easier with one single file system than if the disk is segmented into several partitions.

The disadvantages of single disk partitions is also small but something to consider. With single file system disk partitions the main root directory, and such file systems as /var, share the same disk partition. With /var, possibly growing very large, due to user mail, print spooling and system messages, it could conceivably fill the main disk partition. Unix systems do not handle the root file system reaching maximum capacity to well, and very often, the system will crash. When /var is a separate disk partition from that of / or root, the system will not likely crash when /var fills to capacity.

Your job, as the system administrator, is to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of both and make the best decision possible. I would still suggest the single disk partition unless the application you plan to install requires some other partitioning.

Partitioning Other Disks
The only real consideration in creating a single large partition is with regards to creating the file system. To do so, the newfs command is issued. Newfs is a program for making UFS file systems on disk partitions. The only issue is that, by default, it sets aside a 10% area for file system management, such as keeping the partition relatively unfragmented. Well, 10% of a 9 GB disk partition is 900 MB that will not be available for users to store their data. Therefore, when creating a single disk partition on any disk greater than 4 GB, I would suggest the following:

Determine the single largest file you require to be stored on the disk.

Use this number to determine the minimum minfree, (area of disk set aside for management), space to allocate.
Determine the smallest percentage of the disk partition that would leave the minimum size determined above.
Use this percentage during the newfs command to allocate the proper minfree area.

Example: Largest single file is 200 MB. Using a 9 GB partition would round to approximately 2.5 %. Round the value to 3 % for other possible overhead. This would leave about 270 MB for the minfree area; covering the 200 MB needed for the file in question. Knowing this information, you can use the following newfs command as an example to create a file system on a drive found on controller zero and with a scsi target of two:

# newfs -m 3 /dev/rdsk/c0t2d0s2

When trying to conserve some disk space, a 270 MB minfree area is much better than losing 900 MB. You still maintain enough minfree area for the system to perform its necessary functions.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Installing Solaris
Installation of the Solaris operating system has become quite simple. To install a new system, simply follow the steps provided below for an uneventful installation:

1. Insert the Solaris CD into an attached CDROM.

2. Power-on the system. After the initial banner is displayed, hold the "<stop>-a" key combination. The <stop> key is in the upper left corner of the keyboard and the letter "a" is the letter a. This will cause the system to interrupt its boot sequence.

3. At the OK prompt, type boot cdrom and then hit the return key. Eventually the Solaris installation process will start within the windowing system.

4. You must now answer the questions provided on the several screens that will appear. They deal with the following:

Hostname - The name you want to call the machine.
Networked - Is the machine going to be on a computer network or stand-alone.
IP Address - If networked, you will need to supply a unique IP address.
Subnet Mask - If subnetting your network, provide your subnet mask.
Timezone - Provide timezone, date and time for your geographic location.
Solaris Categories - Provide information for installing the many categories of Solaris. (The best choice here, if you do not know what you may need or not need, is to choose the Developers cluster.
Disk Setup - At this stage you will be required to specify some partitioning requirements for the system boot disk. As stated in the first section above, (Partitioning System Disk), the best choice other than a partition for swap is a single root partition. The Solaris installation will not do this for you by default; you will have to choose the boot disk of the menu to work with and then select the option to manually edit or modify the disk partitions. When in the partition table, first select the second row, type swap for the name of the filesystem and then the size in megabytes you wish to have allocated for swap. Now click back to the first row and type in / for the filesystem name and give the root filesystem whatever is left over after providing your swap requirements.
The system should now proceed with installing the OS as you specified.

5. After the system installs and reboots, you should then install all current recommended Solaris patches. These patches fix the most important and most common bugs in the operating system. These patches can be found from Sun's web site at http://sunsolve1.sun.com/pub-cgi/patchclusters.pl. Simply choose the correct cluster for the version of the OS you are installing. (Note: With a modem connection, downloading these clusters could be quite time consuming. As of this writing, the size for Solaris 2.5.1 recommended patches was about 8.5 MB.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you have any problems that do not appear or can be found via this guide, please feel free to contact Star Systems Engineering, Inc. by emailing support@starinc.com.