The creation of the MINIROOT is an art. Although Sun has an admin package for producing Sun servers and miniroots, because we want a read only miniroot, to be used simultaneously by many workstations (concurrent install of several machines), we had to modify a standard Sun miniroot, using some paradigms from the Sun installation CD. Once the MINIROOT was created (hacked) and its kernel nfs_dlboot replaced (see above), we tar the MINIROOT and put its tar image in the bootkit locker, to be used again and again in installing the installation server.
We have two other pieces of media to worry about: the floppy and the MASTER IMAGE in AFS.
The floppy is easily created using a script in the bootkit locker. We depend on Sun delivering us the new CNBoot, whenever necessary (new release, new PROM).
To produce the MASTER IMAGE we use a script in /afs/dev/system/sun4m_54/tools, after we do some steps detailed in a README file in the same directory. The running of the script lasts a long time, but it takes little or no time to invoke it.