Creating a Solaris Flash Archive

[hari]

This is a quick how to on creating a flash archive.


The flar man page explains a flar as:

A flash archive is an easily transportable version of a reference configuration of the Solaris operating environment, plus optional other software. Such an archive is used for the rapid installation of Solaris on large numbers of machines.


Preparing To Create The Flash Archive

It's recommended that you create the flash archive when there is minimal activity on the system. The best way to do it is by connecting to the system console, rebooting and bring the system to single user mode.

Creating The Flash Archive

Flash archives can be rather large depending on how big your base installation is and what third party software you have installed. Make sure the location where you save your flash archive has several gigabytes of free space. In this example I have mounted an external NFS share to /mnt, where I will be saving the flash archive. Since I am saving the flash archive to /mnt I have specified the -x argument, which tells the flarcreate command to exclude the /mnt mount point.

# flarcreate -n "Archive Name" -a "Author" -S -x /storage -c /storage/sol10.flar


You can also create archives on tape devices.

# flar create -n "Archive Name" -c -S -x /storage -t /dev/rmt/0


Check that the archive on the tape completed successfully.

# flar info -t /dev/rmt/0


It will take a while for the flash archive to complete. The next you reinstall your system you can choose to install your system from a Flash Archive, which will speed up the installation significantly. You will have several option to access the Flash Archive during installation - HTTP, NFS, Local File, Local Tape and Local Device.