Well, this is kinda interesting… I have put two blank disks into a Sun machine and I tried to Jumpstart the machine. Blank - meaning there was no Sun label on them. Long story short… Everything looked good until Jumpstart went interactive just after checking the rules.ok file:

Searching for configuration file(s)...
Using sysid configuration file 10.1.1.1:/export/install/conf_all/sysidcfg
Search complete.
Discovering additional network configuration...
Completing system identification...
Starting remote procedure call (RPC) services: done.
NIS domain name is example.com
System identification complete.
Starting Solaris installation program...
Searching for JumpStart directory...
Using rules.ok from 10.1.1.1:/export/install/conf_all.
Checking rules.ok file...
Warning: Could not find matching rule in rules.ok
Press the return key for an interactive Solaris install program...

I suppose there is a “proper” fix for this, which I admittedly did not bother to investigate at this time. But really, the moral of the story is: If you are Jumpstarting a Sun machine without some “fancy” Jumpstart environment and you are using disks that were not written to by a Solaris machine before, you might run into this.

Basically, Jumpstart will go interactive, because it can not find a valid label on the disks.

You will be informed that disks are unlabeled during the interactive part of setup. You can hit CTRL-C or F2 to get into shell and label the disk manually using format utility. Once you are done at the shell prompt, you can restart Jumpstart process by running suninstall:

# suninstall

This will resume Jumpstart process where you left it at.