I hit an interesting problem tonight with jumpstart. Or old timeserver has gone away and the jumpstart clients are now going into interactive installs asking for the user to set the time. We rely heavily on automated installs so this needed to be fixed.
The solution was obvious I thought. I’ll just set up one of our servers as a ntp server and tell the jumpstart clients to query that in the sysidcfg files.
The only problem is that jumpstart doesn’t query ntp. After snooping on the server for a while it was clear that the packets reqesting the time were not NTP, they were TIME.
Heres how I diagnosed it.
First snoop the install.
snoop -v -o /tmp/snoop.op clientname
Then once your install has gone interactive you can convert that to a readble format:
snoop -i /tmp/snoop.op -v > /tmp/snoop.op.as
Examining the file you can find the time request:
TCP: Source port = 32773 TCP: Destination port = 37 (TIME)
<snip> TCP: TIME: ----- TIME: ----- TIME: TIME: "" TIME:
So, whats port 37 exactly? /etc/services tells us that the time server runs there. (duh!)
The service that runs this is in Solaris 10 svc:/network/time:stream
On solaris 10 you need to do
svcadm enable svc:/network/time:stream
To check that is working ok you can telnet to the server and see if you get any output; if its not running you will get connection refused. This is basically what your jumpstart client is doing.
$ telnet patchtest-231 37 Trying 123.156.231.103... Connected to patchtest-231. Escape character is '^]'. Connection to patchtest-231 closed by foreign host.
We are now back to fully automated jumpstart installs!