Posts tagged with: upgrade

I think one of the best features of Solaris is the Live Upgrade mechanism. This really useful feature can be used for upgrading and patching with very little impact on the server. This means you can patch or upgrade your production system, whilst it's still in production, and only schedule a short outage for the reboot needed to activate the new patched/upgraded environment. Live upgrade also has the added benefit that you can roll back to a known good boot environment in the event something goes wrong. Sadly, it's not always a bed of roses when it comes to using live upgrade as things change with patches and new bugs are discovered and fixed, however most problems can be easily avoided with a little bit of pre-planning. Continue reading ►

The pkg repositories have now been updated to included the 2009.06 pkgs (What's New preso - PDF). There is no need to perform a clean install, you can just use the Update Manager GUI to update your OpenSolaris 2008.11 release to 2009.06. There is one teeny weeny issue that you may encounter - the Update Manager GUI may tell you that there are no new pkgs available. Sadly, the solution isn't clear or intuitive from the GUI: you need to update the SUNWipkg pkg first. The CLI is clearer about this and tells you that you need to update this... Continue reading ►

The latest stable build of Habari was pushed out the doors last night and is now available for download. There have quite a significant number of changes and improvements on the previous stable release (0.5.2) which are documented as follows in the release notes: Continue reading ►

If you're eager to get your hands on OpenSolaris 2008.11, then you can get testing with the release candidate. It's been decided/announced that snv_101a will be the release candidate for 2008.11, and as is common the announcement includes details on how you can update and get testing now. Please note, this release has a minimum memory requirement of 768Mb for the installer to work (Dave Miner thinks it's probably actually in the region of about 580Mb for those with VMs) at the moment, though this is being worked on in an attempt to bring it back down below 512Mb before ... Continue reading ►

The OpenSolaris development package repository has been updated to reflect the changes in snv_97 including major fixes to the Caiman "Slim Install" and the Image Packaging System (IPS). Time to get updating if you're "living on the edge" of the OpenSolaris world. Update instructions are now available online and not just within the announcement emails, but I'm sure you're all familiar with the process by now.

My little Ultra 20 under my desk runs with two boot environments and flip-flop between them as I upgrade using Live Upgrade. The basic procedure is: rename the old inactive BE (lurename), update it with the contents of the currently running BE (lumake), upgrade it to the latest and greatest (luupgrade), activate it (luactivate) and reboot. This is quite a pain free experience and has worked well for me. I never actually delete the alternate BE as I don't need the space. However, other people need to and ever since GRUB was introduced into Solaris 10 (x86 only) they encounter the following error when attempting to delete the BE that contains the GRUB menu: # ludelete -n snv_22 ERROR: The boot environment contains the GRUB menu. ERROR: You are not allowed to delete this BE. Unable to delete boot environment. # This is a long standing issue (I've got a workaround if you want it) that has plagued many a sysadmin using Live Upgrade on Solaris 10 x86 and Nevada. Well, not any more. Continue reading ►

lildude.co.uk is now running on Wordpress 2.5 RC2. Hopefully this will iron out some of the niggles I encountered with RC1. If you're tempted to upgrade, check out the screencast showing some of the cool new features.

Links of interest for 13 Jan 2008 - 27 Jan 2008: Transactional ZFS Upgrades on Nexenta - This is pretty impressive usage of ZFS. Once Solaris officially supports ZFS boot, this is a fantastic feature that could be added to patching and live upgrade. Mystery web infection grows, but cause remains elusive - Pity no one seems to have been able to pin-point an underlying OS for the affected web servers. If something like Solaris, FreeBSD or OS X are involved, DTrace could be used to work out what's going on. Fixing ptrace(pt_deny_attach, ...) on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 3 August 2007: HOWTO: Move a Solaris Containers How To Guides - Details how to move a container from one host to another using functionality already in Solaris Express and due in Solaris 10. HOWTO: Managing ZFS in Solaris 10 Containers - A basic guide that demonstrates the use of ZFS in conjunction with Solaris Containers (zones). HOWTO: Solaris Live Upgrade How-To Guide - Details how to use Live Upgrade to upgrade the OS or apply patches with the least amount of downtime, and chance of corruption or data loss. HOWTO: How to Configure and Run... Continue reading ►