SUMMARY: solaris 9 upgrade tips

Thanks to all who replied, the general consensus is its trouble free.
There are certain exceptions like if you have your root disk under the
control of vxvm (which is not in my case) then it can be a bit painful.
Some useful tips passed on by David Foster:

Upgrade Troubleshooting Tips

Before starting an upgrade, please check for these common problems.

I. BACKUP!

Do a level 0 dump of all filesystems before doing anything under this
document.

II. /etc/vfstab

- Comment out all NFS entries.
- Check for multiple swap entries. Comment out all except for one simple

  disk based swap partition.
- Comment out all data (or non-O.S.) partitions.
- Make sure root partition is on slice 0
- Having entire O.S. in slice 0 is OK.
- Make sure there are no /dev/md/ devices. If any exist, see DISKSUITE
section
below
- Make sure there are no /dev/vx/ devices. If any exist, see Volume
Manager
  section below

III. FSCK

- Make sure devices to fsck are 2 GB or smaller.
- Boot from cdrom and run fsck by hand to fix problems prior to upgrade.

IV. LINKS

- Watch out for links that use absolute paths. Upgrade will overwrite
links
  that it can't reference. This could cause the partition to run out of
  disk space.
- Remove packages that will make changes to automounted directories.
- If symbolic links exist from /var/sadm, either restore the files on
  the /var partition or do a full install.

V. /var

- Make sure /var is under root or a separate partition. /var should not
be
  a link.
- /var/sadm must not be a link or a separate partition.
   Must be directly under /var.
- If symbolic links exist from /var/sadm, either restore the files on
  the /var partition or do a full install.
- Run upgrade.chk to make sure /var/sadm/install/contents is not
corrupt.
- Make sure /var/sadm/softinfo/INST_RELEASE exists and the contents look
like;
  OS=Solaris
  VERSION=2.3
  REV=0


------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
DISKSUITE

DISKSUITE needs to be disabled on OS disks prior to the OS upgrade.

The actual upgrade procedures for DISKSUITE-systems are
found in different places depending on the version of DiskSuite.
You might want to check Appendix D of the Solstice Disksuite 3.0 through
4.1
Administration Guide.  For DiskSuite 4.2 and above, there is a seperate
installation and upgrade document.

Make certain that the new version of Solaris that you are upgrading to
can support the version of DiskSuite you are running, otherwise it
may be necessary for you to upgrade DiskSuite as well.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
VOLUME MANAGER

Volume Manager must be disabled on OS disks prior to upgrade of the OS.
Refer to the Volume Manager Installation Manual for complete procedures
for upgrading Solaris with Volume Manager.  Even if you are not
upgrading
Volume Manager, it is necessary to perform some upgrade functions with
Volume Manager - these steps are documented in the VxVM Installation
Guide.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Kumar sg

-----Original Message-----
From: Kumar Guhan
Sent: 29 April 2004 15:06
To: 'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
Subject: solaris 9 upgrade tips

Hello Gurus,

We are in the process of upgrading a couple of our e450 servers from
solaris 7 to 9. These servers mainly run oracle 8i and some of them
iPlanet web servers, I was wondering whether you had any tips, caveats
to offer regarding these apps and in general upgrading to solaris 9
particularly any patches to watch out for! As sometimes the patches have
a reputation to get noticed!

Thanks in advance will summarise.

Regards,
Kumar sg

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