[rescue] Question on upgrading Solaris 10 3/05 to latest

[D.A. Muran-de Assereto]

Quoting Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net>:

> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:16:18PM -0400, D.A. Muran-de Assereto wrote:
>> <rant> They have really broken the patch QA lately, especially for the
>> Opteron/x86 systems. I've installed at least two on testbed systems that
>> needed to be immediately backed out because they broke the system badly.
>> This has happened both times because smpatch will merrily tell you about
>> patches that require contract patched in order to work right, and will
>> then install the dependent patches without the required contract patch.
>> </rant>
>
> This.  My Via C7-based box here at home that does rsnapshot backups of my
> colo boxes and a couple other systems, is in a "grey" state right now.  It
> boots, will reboot, and works - but patching is all fuct up due to certain
> patchsets not paying attention to dependencies.
>
> I'm going to export the zfs pool, nuke the OS install from orbit, and
> reinstall with the latest S10 release in the next month or so.
>

One of the patch sets broke SMC on a Trusted Extensions System, so it
was not possible to manage it in the Sun-approved way. Another one
made teh kernel unbootable. Still another ate grub. Fortunately, it's
a test box with no operational data, so it was only annoying.
OpenSolaris has been worse, but it's at least labeled "UNSUPPORTED".
OpenSolaris patches have either gone so smoothly I could sell them as
lubricant or have destroyed the box. I am about to take the plunge
again with the 2008.11 release to see if it's gotten any better...

Dave

--
Sapere Aude!