Made a lot of progress.
Learned a lot:
1) If you use 'save_config' on the master clone and extract from it the disk layout and use this layout in the Golden Image (GI) config, then "impacts" is not even used. This gets you the exact clone disk layout, which is what I wanted, and you can ignore doing the impacts thingy mentioned in the manual.
I used the 'save_config' output as a separate file that is referenced as an additional config reference in the INDEX "cfg GI" stanza.
I changed the cfg name and commented out everything but the disk layout, release, timezone, and some of the "System/Networking" customization section.
2) Any "System/Networking" customizations will display on the INSTALL System TAB, but they will also *override* anything that you try to change, so be careful.
This is because the entries have "final" in front of them.
Any custom settings you want simply as defaults displayed on the screen that you can change, like IP address, for example, must have the "final" removed.
In my case, I'm not using DHCP at the boot/install time to get network INSTALL settings.
I do a ctl-C to abort the DHCP request.
At this point, I enter the hostname and IP address and tell it that these are *NOT* temporary.
I remove "final" from hostname & IP address setting in the customization section.
Also, I have a non-final subnet mask and default route, in case I would ever want to change them without having to come back to this Ignite config file.
3) The above gets me almost where I wanted to be -- just enter specific network info, hostname/IPaddr/subnet_mask/def_route, at boot time.
However, the INSTALL also wipes out other system/networking files, even if they are included in the archive (e.g., by using "-l 1").
The following files are wiped out:
/etc/fstab
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/hosts
Thus, I had to add a post-install script to handle those files.
4) However, /etc/nsswitch.conf is *always* being DELETED by the
Configure all unconfigured software filesets
script, which is bad because my post script runs prior to it.
No solution to that yet!?!?!
Any help there would be appreciated.
5) When I used an existing NFS mount point (like /tmp_mnt) to hold the GI archive and said "local", then the archive included the mount point, but with the *mounted* perms; i.e., own= nobody:nogroup, which is not what I want.
In fact, this caused an error during the re-install, which I got around by doing the push-shell/exit2 ignore trick.
Thus, to use NFS to store the GI directly, you should *NOT* use a mount point that you want on the final restore. Create a temp mount point and then exclude it from the archive.
Specifying a remote server via "-s IPaddr" uses remsh, not NFS, and the above is not an issue.
6) Because of 3,4,5) above, I'm just going to use a specific exclude file and "-l 2", since I'm not really gaining anything by using level 1.
Plus, this allows cleaning out trash from tmp dirs and log files.
7) I created my own exclude file.
I used:
+ RESET ONLY
/etc/rc.config.d/netconf
+ NO_ARCHIVE ONLY
... ...
Where the NO_ARCHIVE ONLY list was a tweaked version of that from the make_sys_image default that was obtained by using the "-x" option.
Of course the netconf entry didn't prevent other files from being clobbered as noted above.
8) NOTE the following when using -f specific_exclude file:
...a) you must use the *DIRECT* path to the excluded file. Any intervening directory symlinks in your specified name will cause the file to still be included, since make_sys_image will find the file by its direct pathname.
This is especially important for the GI archive, itself. make_sys_image automatically creates an exclude for the GI archive. If the "-d" path that you specify to the archive being created includes a symlink, then the archive, *itself*, will try to be included in the archive, doubling the size and probably not in a very good state ;>)
Thus, when using "-d", always specify the full, direct path to the archive directory in "-d" or make sure that your exclude file contains the full, direct path to the archive being created.
NOTE: the default -d is /var/tmp, so it is not an issue when you do not use "-d".
...b) any regular expressions are evaluated at the time of reading the exclude file. This normally would not cause any problems.
...c) If you exclude an entire directory, then that directory will not exist in the final restore unless it is created by the INSTALL process (/var/tmp is example).
HOWEVER, if you rely on its creation by INSTALL, you may lose the perms and ownership on the directory.
Thus excluding "/tmp" and "/var/tmp" is not good, because you will lose the "t" perm (delete-only-by-file-owner).
Instead, use
/var/tmp/.??*
/var/tmp/*
9) When I tried to create an un-compressed archive to save time while testing, it bombed out because the size was greater than 8GB !!
It would be nice if that were mentioned in 'man make_sys_image'.
10) /usr/lib/terminfo_colr is not put into the archive, no matter what. I think that it has something to do with Transition Links. I have an old, valuable program that requires it, so I always have a symlink for it.
I had to handle this in the post-install script.
11) Several log files and btmp/wtmp lost their "T" perm and got a "t" , instead. They are all symlinks.
tks
bv
"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." - Chaucer
