Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Solaris 11.2 Beta

Updated:

Note : This page may contain outdated information and/or broken links; some of the formatting may be mangled due to the many different code-bases this site has been through in over 20 years; my opinions may have changed etc. etc.

Yesterday, Oracle announced Solaris 11.2 which includes a lot of interesting new features; not least of which is a full OpenStack distribution. There’s a lot of other improvements as well to all areas of the OS, from ZFS administration to the IPS system and Automated Installer. It also looks like Puppet is now included for systems management. All in all, a good release although it still pains me to see the “Oracle” logo slapped over everything, as well as the general lack of interest in anything Solaris-related these days. Hopefully this can re-kindle some excitement in what is after all, a ground-breaking and incredibly solid platform.

Anyway, one thing that was missing from the announcement was the simple set of steps needed to update a current 11.1 system to the new beta. The beta documentation assumes that 11.2 will be in a production IPS repository, so instead you’ll simply need to switch to the new Beta repository and set it as your “solaris” publisher, upgrade and reboot :

root@solaris:~# pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/beta solaris
root@solaris:~# pkg update --accept

A short download and update will then happen…

            Packages to remove:   5
           Packages to install:  94
            Packages to update: 478
           Mediators to change:   2
       Create boot environment: Yes
Create backup boot environment:  No

DOWNLOAD                                PKGS         FILES    XFER (MB)   SPEED
Completed                            577/577   36168/36168  574.0/574.0  386k/s

PHASE                                          ITEMS
Removing old actions                       7121/7121
Installing new actions                   26702/26702
Updating modified actions                26093/26283
Updating modified actions                26283/26283
Updating package state database                 Done
Updating package cache                       483/483
Updating image state                            Done
Creating fast lookup database                   Done

A clone of solaris exists and has been updated and activated.
On the next boot the Boot Environment solaris-1 will be
mounted on '/'.  Reboot when ready to switch to this updated BE.

Note the last part - one of the things I love about IPS and Solaris 11 is the creation of boot environments. I can see that my system is ready to reboot into Solaris 11.2 :

root@solaris:~# beadm list
BE        Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
--        ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris   N      /          8.26M static 2014-04-28 10:41
solaris-1 R      -          5.81G static 2014-04-30 11:52

So a quick reboot follows :

root@solaris:~# shutdown -i6 -g0 -y

And there it is…

Last login: Wed Apr 30 11:38:32 2014 from xxyyzz
Oracle Corporation      SunOS 5.11      11.2    April 2014
mark@solaris:~$ uname -a
SunOS solaris 5.11 11.2 i86pc i386 i86pc
mark@solaris:~$ head /etc/release
                             Oracle Solaris 11.2 X86
  Copyright (c) 1983, 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates.  All rights reserved.
                             Assembled 23 April 2014
mark@solaris:~$

And, thanks to the magic of ZFS and Boot Environments, I can quickly switch back to 11.1 if there’s a problem :

mark@solaris:~$ beadm list
BE        Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
--        ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris   -      -          9.12M static 2014-04-28 10:41
solaris-1 NR     /          6.03G static 2014-04-30 11:52

mark@solaris:~$ pfexec beadm activate solaris
mark@solaris:~$ beadm list

BE        Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
--        ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris   R      -          4.23G static 2014-04-28 10:41
solaris-1 N      /          2.40G static 2014-04-30 11:52

mark@solaris:~$ pfexec init 6

Reboot, and I’m back to where I started. Much smoother than some upgrades I’ve had in the past :) Here’s to the full 11.2 release!

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