Modifying a Nexenta Boot ISO

Today I needed to modify a nexenta Alpha-6 install ISO. There were several things I needed to fix.

1. We have two revisions of the same Supermicro H8DAR-T based beige-box systems. Solaris10/Nexenta works great on the 2.01 based motherboards. The older version - version 1.01 - does not have a SATA chipset that is supported by Nexenta out of the box. (The PCI ID is "pci11ab,6041.3" versus "pci11ab,6041.9" on the 2.01 version). I needed to add this PCI ID to the "/etc/driver_aliases" file. Aside: As far as I can tell, the only way to differentiate is to crack open the box and look for the silkscreened version on the back lefthand corner. :-( (Or, you could boot Nexenta/Solaris10 and see if it can see the disks :-) )

2. There is a bug in the nexenta-install.sh script that will hang the system while scanning for partitions after manual partitioning. I found a response to this post by LukeD in the Nexenta forums that is reported to fix this problem.

3. We wanted to add a couple of packages to the "minimal" set.

If we start a widespread Nexenta rollout there will be much more automation going into these CD images (Or even better, network images) to make for a hands-off install.

Here's how I made the changes:

1. Copied the .ISO image to another Nexenta system. (There is nothing Nexenta/Solaris specific to making the image, however, the commands used are somewhat different between different operating systems. On a linux system, you would use losetup instead of lofiadm. )

2. Create a loopback device for the .iso and mount it:

lofiadm -a /opt/temp/elatte_installcd_alpha6_i386.iso
( this creates /dev/lofi/1 )
mkdir /mnt
mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

3. Copy all of the files to a temporary location. This is necessary because the .ISO image is read only.

mkdir /opt/temp/cd
cp -av /mnt/. /opt/temp/cd/.

4. Find and mount the miniroot image as a second loopback device. The miniroot is a gzipped UFS filesystem created in the "boot" directory of the CD. Most of the filesystem is here, although it appears that nexenta remounts /usr from the CD-ROM later in the boot process. This step is required because I am changing the "driver_aliases" file, which lives inside the gzipped miniroot -- if you plan only to modify the nexenta_install.sh and/or add packages, these steps (4-6) are not necessary.

cd /opt/temp/cd/boot/
mv miniroot miniroot.gz
gunzip miniroot.gz
lofiadm -a /opt/temp/cd/boot/miniroot
( this creates /dev/lofi/2 )
mkdir /mnt2
mount /dev/lofi/2 /mnt2

5. Edit the driver_aliases file:

cd /mnt2/etc
(vi driver_aliases)

... If there are any other files that need to change within the miniroot, edit them now.

6. Unmount and re-gzip the miniroot, and clean up the other lofi mount too.

umount /mnt2
lofiadm -d /dev/lofi/2
umount /mnt
lofiadm -d /dev/lofi/1
cd /opt/temp/cd/boot
gzip miniroot
mv miniroot.gz miniroot

7. Fix the script mentioned in problem #2 and add some packages to the minimal set.

cd /opt/temp/cd/root/usr/gnusolaris
vi nexenta-install.sh
(I chose to do a "grep -i "Unknown_fstype" rather than run the sed script referenced in the forum post above)
vi base-minimal.lst
(add some packages here)

8. Create the new install CD. I found some good instructions on BigAdmin at the end of this article in the section "Using CD/DVD ISO Files":

mkisofs -o /opt/temp/nexenta_boot.iso -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito \
   -c .catalog -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
   -boot-info-table -relaxed-filenames -ldots -N -l -R \
   -d -D -V Elatte_InstallCD /opt/temp/cd/

This will create the new .ISO file. From there you'll need to burn it to disk.

Unfortunately, adding the new driver_alias line didn't work for me. It sees the controller now, but it pukes about not knowing how to talk to it. (Forgot the exact error message but it looked ominous). I will have to do some testing on a known-working box (one of the later revision ones) to see if the other changes I made to this CD were successful.

Edit: The mkisofs command I originally listed was incorrect. I have found the magic mkisofs command parameters and updated this post accordingly. Note that the volume name MUST be "Elatte_InstallCD".