Customer Reviews

JumpStart Technology: Effective Use in the Solaris Operating Environment (With CD-ROM)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a must-have for administrators that want to deploy jumpstart effectively. The book comes with a CD that has scripts that are referenced in the book chapters. This is a huge time saver, since you don't have to start from scratch for different deployments.
Sun's online documentation and man pages for jumpstart aren't that great. This book fills the gap, for the most part. If you read through this quickly, you will understand jumpstart fairly well. I give it 3 stars because the book is lacking a complete, succinct description of how to quickly "just set it up". Some of the commands are vague as to exactly on which system they should be run, or what syntax might blow up an installation. There is a lot of information, but it isn't organized that well. Better organization and a chapter on the entire jumpstart system and which files are essential on which servers would make this a 5 star book.

Jumpstart is still not for the faint of heart, but this book at least offers more detail on the subject, and a solid sysadmin will get everything they need from this book and a little time troubleshooting any issues.

While documentation about JumpStart is extremely limited, this book just doesn't cut it. It is a conglomeration of documents that are available from Sun for free. Only, there is more documentation from Sun available than is accumulated in this book.

There is supposed to be a new edition out in a few months that's supposed to have much more information in. Save your money for this edition and download the documentation from Sun - check the next edition, maybe it'll be better.

Summary

A solid reference of implementation details and simple real
world scenarios of the JumpStart technology from Sun.

However, enterprise class design issues such as high availability, scaling and resource requirements are not covered in detail.

Details

This book provides thorough coverage of the JumpStart boot process and installing and configuring a JumpStart server.

Boot process details examined include supported boot protocols ( NFS, DHCP, NIS+, NIS ), the systems used during a JumpStart boot, and an illustrated guide of the boot sequence.

In depth explanations of configuration options will help advanced administrators make the most of their JumpStart deployment. Rules file, profiles file and sysidcfg files are reviewed. Begin and finish scripts are covered.

Post installation customizations are demonstrated with examples in it's own chapter.

Other issues such as system recovery, web flash, security and cloning are briefly covered.

Advice on JumpStart deployment issues such as bandwidth, scaling or high availability are not included in the scope of this book.

It was extremely interesting to learn the process on building a bootable JumpStart CD.

Personally, I thought this book provided value because it is a great single point of reference for a lot of expert advice on installing and configuring the Jumpstart technology. This book is well organized to help administrators setup and configure a JumpStart server.

I really didn't learn much more than I already know about jumpstart but the book contains some unexpected benefits.
John and Alex show you how to setup a semi elaborate test environment.
You are shown how to setup:
NIS server
NIS+ server
LDAP server
DHCP server (on Solaris)

In addition you are shown how to add a client to each environment and then test a jumpstart config for adding other clients.

Seriously, check your book. Mine is missing pages 7-30, but in an attempt to counter this flaw, I did get 2 sets of pages 1-6. Or is there someone else out there missing pages 1-6 and has 2 sets of pages 7-30.

But overall, the book is good. I used some white papers from Sun's site and this book to get Jumpstart working.