Hi all,
one week ago I asked:
> to minimize the downtime of a heavily used machine I would like to
> upgrade the system from Solaris 2.4 to 2.5.1 as follows. All
> important filesystems ( /, /usr, /var, /opt, /export) are on
> a 9GB disk c0t1d0. An unused 9GB disk is available as c0t2d0 so
> that I can make c0t2d0 an identical duplicate of c0t1d0. Then
> I change c0t1d0 to c0t2d0 in vfstab on c0t2d0. Can I now
> use suninstall or some other procedure to upgrade c0t2d0 while
> being in multi user mode and when ready just do:
>
> eeprom 'boot-device=disk2'; reboot
>
> So the downtime would be in the best case just 5 minutes.
> Is that possible?
I got the following answers:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: hxktb0@svho1ds_1.supervalu.com (Kris Briscoe)
>
> To effectively upgrade you need to be in single user mode....also to upgrade you
> need to boot cdrom..
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: John Justin Hough <john@oncology.uthscsa.edu>
>
> It is possible to build the 9G disk 2.5.1 on another machine
> already running 2.5.1 or by itself and configure the vfstab
> for mounting partitions already on the system running 2.4.
> Shutdown the 2.4 machine, attach the disk, boot off the 9G
> with a "-r" option to reconfigure and the system should come
> right up.
>
> If you've got another machine that is what I'd do, because
> it will cause the least down time.
>
> Then you could copy of the 2.5.1 root and usr partitions
> over the 2.4's, run installboot and reboot at your convenience.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: "Henry Katz" <hkatz@lehman.com>
>
> Yes - you can safely do this trick, alternate which disk is bootable.
> Make sure you specify the correct partition on the installboot command.
>
> Just make sure you don't make a typo in your vfstab or bad things will
> happen :-)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@itw.com>
>
> I've done tricks like this with SunOS, and they've worked out
> fine, but haven't tried it with Solaris yet. One thing to
> be careful of: make sure that you have done everything that
> needs to be done in order to boot off the second (upgraded
> from 2.4 to 2.5.1) drive. For example, the change you
> mention to vfstab; any changes you might need to make to
> sharetab; changes you might want to make to /etc/dumpdates
> or to your backup scripts; and so on. Any time that I've
> had trouble, it's because I've forgotten to change a reference
> to a disk partition -- so grep'ing c0t1d0 through everything
> in /etc, /usr/local/etc, /usr/local/bin, etc. in order to
> find references to it, is probably not a bad idea.
>
> Also, if you don't absolutely need to run 2.5.1, go with 2.5;
> the 2.5.1 release is much flakier, in my opinion.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many thanks to:
hxktb0@svho1ds_1.supervalu.com (Kris Briscoe)
John Justin Hough <john@oncology.uthscsa.edu>
"Henry Katz" <hkatz@lehman.com>
Rich Kulawiec <rsk@itw.com>
and best regards,
Martin.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Martin Walter | mawa@uni-freiburg.de | Disclaimer: All above |
| Hermann-Herder-Str.10 | University CC | is my opinion unless |
| D-79104 Freiburg | +49 761 203 4651 | specified otherwise. |
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