Archive for the 'Software' Category

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 [...]

I work with a couple of guys who are quite stuck in their ways and are quite reliant on old tools, one of which is xclipboard(1).
Unfortunately, Gnome comes with it’s own clipboard manager, so when you try to run xclipboard, you get the following:
$ xclipboard
Error: another clipboard is already running
$
Of course, ps(1M) will show no [...]

If you’re running a fair few non-global zones on Solaris 10, you’ll know full well how painfully slow the patching process is. Well, I’m please to say “not any more”.
The Zones Parallel Patching feature was officially released on Tuesday and is contained in the latest Solaris 10 patch utilities patch, 119254-66 (SPARC) and 119255-66 [...]

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 [...]

I was a little early this morning with my post about upgrading as technically OpenSolaris 2009.06 hadn’t been released. Well it has now. Check out the official release announcement for a different “What’s New and links to the various downloads.
Oh yes, and SPARC support is now officially included too.

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 - [...]