Archive for the 'Operating Systems' Category

Did you know you can now upgrade both VxVM AND Solaris using Live Upgrade without reverting to underlying devices? I didn’t, until today when I discovered a document on exactly this topic from Symantec: Upgrading VxVM and/or Solaris using Live Upgrade.
From what I can see in this document, it appears VxVM now comes with [...]

If you’ve ever had to setup and troubleshoot NIS+, you’ll know what a nightmare it can be and quite frankly how unreliable it is unless you’re 100% accurate with all your configuration and settings and really know what you’re doing. Well, you’ll also be pleased to know NIS+ is also finally DEAD!!!
Sun [...]

If you think Solaris patching is a complete nightmare, have a bit of spare time on your hands (don’t worry, you can still check emails etc) and really want to get up speed on Sun’s best practices for patching on Solaris 10, then check out the FREE Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices (WS-2700-S10) training course.
It’s [...]

I encountered a problem this evening that I can’t really explain, I couldn’t install any pkgs via the Package Manager or command line. Both were failing with the same error:

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWant
Creating Plan -
pkg: The following pattern(s) did not match any packages in the current catalog.
Try relaxing the pattern, refreshing and/or examining [...]

I’ve just had a “how cool is this” moment. I was browsing through the zfs(1M) man page on OpenSolaris and spotted this excerpt…
vscan=on | off

Controls whether regular files should be scanned for
[...]

Sun has quietly released Solaris 10 10/09 (aka update 8 ) and it is now available for download. As usual, the “What’s New” doc has all the gory details of what’s new in this release, but for the lazy, here’s a quick summary of some of the more significant new features:

You can now install [...]

It’s with great delight I read that the Solaris 10 Recommended and SunAlert patch clusters have been improved. Ed Clark has sat down and finally improved the install_cluster script, now called installcluster, and the cleaned up the directory structure. The whole build and verification process has been improved too.
The improvements are quite significant [...]

Ever wished you could get patchadd(1M) to give you the same verbose output pkgadd(1M) does with the -v option? Well believe it or not, you can, it’s just not documented.
I was perusing through the /usr/lib/patch/patchadd script on Solaris 10 and look what I found…

function parse_args
{
[...]
[...]

There is a very old bug in Solaris (now fixed in Nevada) in which the underlying permissions of a mount point affect the overlying mounted filesystem. The normal way to resolve this is to umount the filesystem, correct the permission and remount it.
This is sometime easier said than done, for example, what if [...]

As promised on Friday, I’ve taken the plunge and tested applying the latest patch cluster to a fresh Solaris 10u5 installation running 10 zones using the new zones parallel patching feature.
To speed things up and to try and prevent any problems I performed the following steps:

Jumpstarted the OS (SUNWCuser cluster)
Applied patches 125555-04 and 119254-66 (gives [...]