One other benefit of using ZFS and it’s ability to take snapshots of an entire filesystems … is that I can upgrade my boot environment inside a clone of my existing system. If I have problems, I can always roll back with a single command line.
Those days of maintaining a 2nd set of hardware for testing operating system patches may be numbered!
[see: OpenSolaris getting started guide, and OpenSolaris Boot Environments docs]
Here are the 2 commands I used to update my Solaris install. In other OSes this is the equivalent of taking a whole disk backup (to external media for later recovering a broken Upgrade), running the Update on every installed piece of software (Operating system, applications & documentation etc) and then reboot.
root@opensolaris:~# pkg image-update -v
Creating Plan / Before evaluation:
UNEVALUATED:
+pkg:/entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.101:20081204T010954Z
After evaluation:
pkg:/entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.101:20081119T235706Z -> pkg:/entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.101:20081204T010954Z
Actuators:
None
PHASE ACTIONS
Update Phase 1/1
PHASE ITEMS
Reading Existing Index 9/9
Indexing Packages 1/1
A clone of opensolaris exists and has been updated and activated.
On the next boot the Boot Environment opensolaris-1 will be mounted on ‘/’.
Reboot when ready to switch to this updated BE.
—————————————————————————
NOTE: Please review release notes posted at:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/relnotes/200811/x86/
—————————————————————————
root@opensolaris:~# init 6
After the reboot all seems fine, so I can beadm destroy to free up space and get rid of the old backup snapshot. Note that doing this, you lose the auomatically added GRUB console option to boot into a text console only mode to repair your OpenSolaris. Hrm – I guess they’ll fix that in a later release.
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