Greetings:

We have purchased a Sun 2540 storage server which will be attached to
a Sun Fire V440 which is running out of room on several filesystems. The
440 is running Solaris 10 1/06. The release notes for the 2540 indicate that
Solaris 10 Upgrade 3 is needed, which I believe is the 11/06 release.

Although we have had Sun machines in our shop for over 12 years, I have
never actually upgraded Solaris. All of my installs have been clean. So
I'm wondering what I have to look forward to. If upgrade 3 is required then
I should probably go ahead and download the latest Solaris 10, which is
8/07? I have read about Live Upgrade but that appears to need a spare disk
partition, which I don't have.

What can I expect if I just download the latest Solaris 10 and install it
on top of my existing Solaris 10? For example, will settings in /etc be
preserved? There are no zones involved. I will of course have a good backup
of /, /usr, and /var before starting. Thanks for any advice...

Jim McCullars
University of Alabama in Huntsville

On Feb 25, 10:38 am, Jim McCullars <j...@info2.uah.edu> wrote:
>
> We have purchased a Sun 2540 storage server which will be attached to
> a Sun Fire V440 which is running out of room on several filesystems. The
> 440 is running Solaris 10 1/06. The release notes for the 2540 indicate that
> Solaris 10 Upgrade 3 is needed, which I believe is the 11/06 release.

Probably a minimum requirement. Use update 4. Update 5 will soon be
released

> Although we have had Sun machines in our shop for over 12 years, I have
> never actually upgraded Solaris. All of my installs have been clean. So
> I'm wondering what I have to look forward to. If upgrade 3 is required then
> I should probably go ahead and download the latest Solaris 10, which is
> 8/07? I have read about Live Upgrade but that appears to need a spare disk
> partition, which I don't have.

A minimum of one partition and large enough for the lot.

> What can I expect if I just download the latest Solaris 10 and install it
> on top of my existing Solaris 10? For example, will settings in /etc be
> preserved? There are no zones involved. I will of course have a good backup
> of /, /usr, and /var before starting. Thanks for any advice...

/usr should not be standalone ; /

You must have funding or budget problems.. You have the $$ for a FC/AL
array
and presumeably the HBA(s) but no $$ for another internal disk for
live_upgrade. Yuk.

What you really need is a test box that is capable of running Sol 10
u4. Then you can
answer such questions yourself. That aside you can generally safely
proceed through
the upgrade proceedure up to the point where you see a "This system
is upgradeable"
message. Not an exact quote but close enough. Prepare for downtime.
Possibly hours of it.

On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 18:38 +0000, Jim McCullars wrote:
> Greetings:
>
> We have purchased a Sun 2540 storage server which will be attached to
> a Sun Fire V440 which is running out of room on several filesystems. The
> 440 is running Solaris 10 1/06. The release notes for the 2540 indicate that
> Solaris 10 Upgrade 3 is needed, which I believe is the 11/06 release.
>
> Although we have had Sun machines in our shop for over 12 years, I have
> never actually upgraded Solaris. All of my installs have been clean. So
> I'm wondering what I have to look forward to. If upgrade 3 is required then
> I should probably go ahead and download the latest Solaris 10, which is
> 8/07? I have read about Live Upgrade but that appears to need a spare disk
> partition, which I don't have.

Even new Solaris is open to exploit without patches. Original Solaris
10 has a well known zero day exploit if the telnet server is running:

telnet -l "-froot" your-old-solaris-host

Instant remote root!!

I'd recommend doing regular patching.

>
> What can I expect if I just download the latest Solaris 10 and install it
> on top of my existing Solaris 10? For example, will settings in /etc be
> preserved? There are no zones involved. I will of course have a good backup
> of /, /usr, and /var before starting. Thanks for any advice...

Oddly, not sure I've ever tried it...

Upgrades to us mean going from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10. The rest
is merely patching.

In article <07a1c4b3-fecb-4afc-84d3-106b2d61acc0@72g2000hsu.googlegroups.com>,
usenetpersongerryt@gmail.com writes:
> On Feb 25, 10:38 am, Jim McCullars <j...@info2.uah.edu> wrote:
>> Although we have had Sun machines in our shop for over 12 years, I have
>> never actually upgraded Solaris. All of my installs have been clean. So
>> I'm wondering what I have to look forward to. If upgrade 3 is required then
>> I should probably go ahead and download the latest Solaris 10, which is
>> 8/07? I have read about Live Upgrade but that appears to need a spare disk
>> partition, which I don't have.
>
> A minimum of one partition and large enough for the lot.

A slice for each system filesystem you want to keep separate. (You
can merge and split filesystems during a live upgrade, so you can
get away with one if you want just one system filesystem at the end.)

Normally I would strongly recommend live upgrade, but there's patch
hell before you can do live upgrade to U4. If you are happy with your
backups in the event you want to fall back (I haven't heard of anyone
needing to), and you haven't done live upgrade before, and you can
stand the downtime during upgrade, then I would concede that doing
an upgrade install is probably best option for you in this case.

>> What can I expect if I just download the latest Solaris 10 and install it
>> on top of my existing Solaris 10? For example, will settings in /etc be
>> preserved?

Yes.

>> There are no zones involved. I will of course have a good backup
>> of /, /usr, and /var before starting. Thanks for any advice...
>
> /usr should not be standalone ; /

That's fully supported in Solaris.

> What you really need is a test box that is capable of running Sol 10
> u4. Then you can
> answer such questions yourself.

Yes.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

In <fpv1up$7iu$1@news.uah.edu> Jim McCullars <jim@info2.uah.edu> writes:

> Although we have had Sun machines in our shop for over 12 years, I have
>never actually upgraded Solaris. All of my installs have been clean. So
>I'm wondering what I have to look forward to. If upgrade 3 is required then
>I should probably go ahead and download the latest Solaris 10, which is
>8/07? I have read about Live Upgrade but that appears to need a spare disk
>partition, which I don't have.

Live Upgrade is excellent for this purpose. Disks are cheap. That's
what I recommend. Downtime is limited to a reboot.

> What can I expect if I just download the latest Solaris 10 and install it
>on top of my existing Solaris 10? For example, will settings in /etc be
>preserved? There are no zones involved. I will of course have a good backup
>of /, /usr, and /var before starting. Thanks for any advice...

On a fresh install, no settings are preserved. If you have a good
configuration management system, it will restore most of those settings.
You can also do an upgrade install, which will preserve settings.
Provided that the existing partitions are large enough, this does work
nicely. It's slower than a fresh install, resulting in more downtime.

--
-Gary Mills- -Unix Support- -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-

On Feb 25, 12:43 pm, and...@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel)
wrote:
> In article <07a1c4b3-fecb-4afc-84d3-106b2d61a...@72g2000hsu.googlegroups.com>,
> usenetpersonger...@gmail.com writes:
> > On Feb 25, 10:38 am, Jim McCullars <j...@info2.uah.edu> wrote:
> >> Although we have had Sun machines in our shop for over 12 years, I have
> >> never actually upgraded Solaris. All of my installs have been clean. So
> >> I'm wondering what I have to look forward to. If upgrade 3 is required then
> >> I should probably go ahead and download the latest Solaris 10, which is
> >> 8/07? I have read about Live Upgrade but that appears to need a spare disk
> >> partition, which I don't have.
> > A minimum of one partition and large enough for the lot.
> A slice for each system filesystem you want to keep separate. (You
> can merge and split filesystems during a live upgrade, so you can
> get away with one if you want just one system filesystem at the end.)
> Normally I would strongly recommend live upgrade, but there's patch
> hell before you can do live upgrade to U4.

I will concede that to be a convoluted exercise! : >

> If you are happy with your
> backups in the event you want to fall back (I haven't heard of anyone
> needing to), and you haven't done live upgrade before, and you can
> stand the downtime during upgrade, then I would concede that doing
> an upgrade install is probably best option for you in this case.
> >> What can I expect if I just download the latest Solaris 10 and install it
> >> on top of my existing Solaris 10? For example, will settings in /etc be
> >> preserved?
> Yes.
> >> There are no zones involved. I will of course have a good backup
> >> of /, /usr, and /var before starting. Thanks for any advice...
> > /usr should not be standalone ; /
> That's fully supported in Solaris.

Sure it is. But you must know anyone who DOES this is the probably the
LAST person who should : /

usenetpersongerryt@gmail.com wrote:

> You must have funding or budget problems.. You have the $$ for a FC/AL
> array
> and presumeably the HBA(s) but no $$ for another internal disk for
> live_upgrade. Yuk.

The machine has four internal drives, all of which have filesystems on
them (filesystems that are getting full), which is why I am having to purchase
an external storage system. Interestingly enough, we are getting the array
pretty cheap because of an edu promo that Sun is running through June.

Chris Cox <ccox_nopenothis@airmail.net> wrote:

> Even new Solaris is open to exploit without patches. Original Solaris
> 10 has a well known zero day exploit if the telnet server is running:

I remember that one. Fortunately we comment telnetd out of inetd.conf
as a matter of practice. Of course, the sshd could have had the same
exploit I suppose, fortunately it didn't.

Gary Mills <mills@cc.umanitoba.ca> wrote:

> On a fresh install, no settings are preserved. If you have a good
> configuration management system, it will restore most of those settings.
> You can also do an upgrade install, which will preserve settings.
> Provided that the existing partitions are large enough, this does work
> nicely. It's slower than a fresh install, resulting in more downtime.

Thanks for the heads-up. Out of several replies, no one has told any
horror stories so I should be OK. I now know to plan for more downtime than
I had originally thought. Thanks again...

On Feb 26, 2:12 pm, Jim McCullars <j...@info2.uah.edu> wrote:
> usenetpersonger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> > /usr should not be standalone ; /
> >> That's fully supported in Solaris.
> > Sure it is. But you must know anyone who DOES this is the probably the
> > LAST person who should : /
>
> If by standalone you mean mount /usr on its own filesystem, we have always
> done this. Probably because it was that way when I first was exposed to
> Solaris (which was either a late SunOS 4 or 2.5.1, I forget which).
> The newer Sun boxes come in with /, /usr, and /var all one the root filesystem
> which is woefully undersized, especially if you keep up with the recommended
> and security patches.

Well the default values are silly. Always have been, So they must be
intended as
"hints but dont use this in real life..."

> First thing I always do is reinstall Solaris with
> /var and /usr on separate filesystems. Old habits and such, y'know :-)

Well if it hasnt burned you yet you are probably OK. Ive seen some
pretty dumb things
occuring with a separate /usr. Like someone as root running # umount /
usr.
I can see separating / and var but not /usr. Whats the gain?