Create a local Solaris flash archive

Contributed by qmchenry October 8, 2003  
Tagged: Solaris system administration

Flash archives are mirrored images of a system that can be installed on another system of the same architecture. The flash archive can include third-party packages as well as optional Solaris components like Solstice DiskSuite.

Note: to install the flash archive on other systems of the same architecture (i.e., sun4u), it is recommended that the system to be flashed be installed with the entire Solaris distribution + OEM packages.

To create a local flash archive, setup a disk slice (say c0t0d0s7) with a filesystem (i.e., newfs), and mount it:

mkdir /export/flash
mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7 /export/flash

To create a flash archive of the local system and name it mail-server-01 (the name is arbitrary), run:

flarcreate -n mail-server-01 -x /export/flash -c /export/flash/mail-server-01

The -x parameter is useful for excluding directories from the flash archive and can be repeated. The -c option turns on compression.