sol-inst is a collection of Perl modules to access basic installation information on a Solaris system. Solaris::InstallDB Manages and searches for packages Solaris::Contents Reads/accesses /var/sadm/install/contents Solaris::Package Reads the pkginfo file for a given package Solaris::Patchdiag Reads a patchdiag.xref file BACKGROUND A long time ago, I had a conversation with a fellow engineer about how to properly jumpstart a Solaris server. He was convinced that the only proper way to bring up a new server was to use the SUNWCall cluster, and then delete the software you didn't need. For example, if I didn't need X-Windows, I should just "rm -rf /usr/openwin/" Others argued that SUNWCreq doesn't really install the necessary software needed to maintain a running system, but they never really elaborated on what exactly that missing software was. So, I took it up as a project to learn more about Solaris packages, the jumpstart process, patching, etc, etc. I read the Jumpstart book, the Application Packaging Developers Guide, and various man pages. After awhile I noticed that a lot of the package data files were relatively simple formats, so I wrote some perl scripts to do some simple operations, and ended up creating these modules. INSTALLATION perl Makefile.PL make make test make install SUPPORT This code is considered beta. My only testing environment is my own network, so there are situations I haven't considered. I will try to respond to bug reports, but there may be some situations where I can't replicate the environment you are encountering an error in. FUTURE WORK If these modules prove to be useful, it would seem logical to create more modules to handle other installation data or installation operations. For example, modules to read the .clustertoc/.cdtoc files, modules to represent patch distributions, or even modules to access Sun online resources, like SunSolve or the Fingerprint database. COPYRIGHT Copyright 2000 Chris Josephes This library is free software, and you are free to use it under the same terms as Perl itself.