Sun Microsystems Solaris 7 11/99, Hardware Platform Manual

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Chapter 10 The Solaris 7 11/99 Operating Environment on the Sun Enterprise 10000 Server 185
Check the documentation of other software you are running, such as any disk
volume managers, before you use the
upgrade
option. There may be additional
instructions you need to follow to preserve existing configurations, especially for
Alternate Pathing, Solstice™ DiskSuite™, or Veritas Volume Manager.
During an upgrade, the
suninstall
utility attempts to preserve local modifications
to the server whenever possible; however, local modifications might make an
upgrade fail or perform differently than you would expect.
The following table includes tasks you should perform before you upgrade the
domain.
TABLE 10-4
Upgrading Tasks
What to Do
Before Upgrading
How to Why
Preserve
symbolic links Replace symbolic links that use
absolute paths with symbolic links
that use relative paths.
For example, if
/usr/openwin
is
a symbolic link to
/export/openwin
change the symbolic link to
../export/openwin
During an upgrade, the
suninstall
utility cannot
reference symbolic links that use absolute paths
because the Solaris installation program mounts the
root (
/
) file system at
/a
. For example, a symbolic link
to
/export/openwin
would fail because during an
upgrade,
/export/openwin
is really
/a/export/openwin
.
When the
suninstall
utility cannot reference a
symbolic link, it will overwrite the symbolic link and
install the software (the installation program does not
know that the software exists). As a result, duplicate
software will be installed, and the upgrade may fail
because of insufficient disk space.
Preserve
symbolic links
to automounted
file systems Remove packages (by using
Software Manager or the
pkgrm(1M)
command) that will
create files or directories currently
automounted.
The automounter is not active during an upgrade, so
the
suninstall
utility installs any package’s files or
directories that are symbolic links to automounted file
systems. If a symbolic link is overwritten, the upgrade
may fail because of insufficient disk space.
(If you cannot remove a package, you can replace the
symbolic link after the upgrade is completed.)
Note: The
/var/mail
and
/var/news
directories,
which usually reside on an automounted file system,
are not affected by an upgrade.
Prevent
unneeded file
systems from
being mounted In the
/etc/vfstab
file,
comment out file systems that you
do not want mounted during the
upgrade.
During an upgrade, the
suninstall
utility attempts
to mount all of the file systems listed in the
/etc/vfstab
file on the root file system being
upgraded. If the Solaris installation program cannot
mount a file system, it reports the failure and exits.