More On Updating Solaris

Previously I talked about updating Solaris 11/06 to Solaris Express b55 in order to have the newer zfs receive option that forces a rollback just prior to doing an incremental receive. I tried a few weeks ago, before my time off when my dad passed away, to update one of our storage servers to Solaris Express DE build 55 from Solaris 11/06. The update didn’t go too well, because it stopped saying there wasn’t enough disk space. When I had originally built that machine, I used Solaris’ default configuration of the boot drive, which included a small (4GB or so) root partition. I didn’t have a lot of time at that point to figure out an alternate approach, so I stopped the update, and kept Solaris 11/06.

I’m back to trying to figure that out now, so I installed Solaris 11/06 using the default installation settings for disk partitions, onto a test box. Now I’m running the installer of Solaris Express DE b55 on it to see if I can upgrade it. The first try, I chose the GRUB menu selection that would install Solaris Express plus the developer tools. That resulted in a funny error message that stated something like This installer requires 768 MB of RAM to run. This machine has 767 MB of RAM. Please choose a different method of installation. I laughed between curse words when I read that.

Next I tried installing just Solaris in the GRUB boot menu. The installer tested the installation profile, determined that it would have to reconfigure the partitions on disk to fit this version of Solaris, and asked for a writable backup area so that it could backup my stuff. I specified a shared zfs partition on our Thumper box, and away it went. It is now in the process of doing the upgrade. When it’s done I’ll check it out to see if my stuff is all still there. Wait, crap, it has failed. It says that the share point on the NFS server must have o+rw rights. Doh. I’ll fix that and try again.

Now the machine is working through the installer. It’s an amazing 1% done so far.

Well, it failed again. So far not too good. I may have to backup important stuff in my boot disks to zfs, export my zfs filesystems and reinstall Solaris from scratch on the boxes I’m interested in. Luckily the Thumper box has a bigger boot partition and it should upgrade with no problems.