upgradation of solaris 2.5.1 OS 2

[bhawani123]

Hi Guys,

I have running solaris 2.5.1 OS in sparc-station 10 and disk have five partition.all the partition have very curicial data but my manager say upgrade the
solaris 2.5.1 software to Solaris 2.7 Software.
I have taken the entire backup of disk for backup purpose but My manager says without data loss you can upgrade the software.
I am very confused about upgradation without restoring of data from backup disk how we can upgrade it.
Please help me out.

Regd,
Ajay

 

[harris79]

Ajay

Your manager is right you can upgrade the OS without losing the data.
When you run the installer from the CD it gives 2 options Initial install and Upgrade.

Initial install will run newfs on your disk partitions and wipe out everything, but upgrade will only modify the existing OS files to the new version and add the new functionality of Solaris 7 (or 8).

Having said that taking a full backup first is always worth the time.

Steve

 

[bhawani123]

Thanks for your mail.But My question is can we get the same partition size and data on same place.

Regd,
Ajay

 

[harris79]

The partitions will not be modified nor will the data be touched by an upgrade. The only changes are to the system files.

Provided you have some space available in /, /var, /usr etc. for the additional packages which make up the
new version of the OS there should be no problems.

Steve

 

[012]

Hi Steve,
Well as u have said that there will be changes in / and /usr in upgrading,will the extra packages like gcc,top,samba etc (which all use /usr fs) be still running or will I have to install them again....
Thanx in advance...

 

[harris79]

I don't know about those particular apps, but I have never had to reload anything after an upgrade.
We use Oracle Databases and Genesys call centre applications these have no problems with upgraded OS.

I went to a Sun presentation where they said that any application using standard system calls under Solaris 2.4,
will run under Solaris 8. The apps you mention are available from the Sun freeware site, so they should use "standard system calls".

Steve

 

[012]

Thanks a lot ...Steve

 

[lfoata]

I have done the upgrade from 2.5.1 to 2.7 and it went fine.
I did not have to recompile any package.

You may have to recompile some if you are going for 64 bits. But then you will have to restore also.
Also make sure you have the free space for the upgrade, I remember it needs about 200 megs free in /usr and maybe some more in other file systems.

Why dont you go directly to solaris 8, it is a good release, I have it running on many servers and it works fine.

Feel safe, you are not going to loose any data with the upgrade.

 

[Guest_imported]

Hi,

Solaris 8 runs from a flash new gui, which means you need at least 380Mb of swap, (even if you only have 64Mb of memory, 128Mb of swap...) in which case you'll need to install from scratch, then restore your partitions by hand.

8 is OK, it's a lot better than 7, (though both require more work on newer/faster machines) if you install either on a machine with a processor faster than 417Mhz then you'll need to boot with a seperate CD before using the OS install CD's, failure to do this will screw up the clock timing of the keyboard chip resulting in you being unable to type, which means, you can't login. (though I think Stop-A still works

later
jb

 

[bhawani123]

Thanks for all.

Hello iofata,

I did the following step for upgradation.

1=booted the system from cdrom.
2=Selected the drive where I wanted to upgrade my software and selected the preserve Mode and I left the all partition as I had earlier.
3=It showed the all partion but in preserv mode It was saying the change the name of /,/usr,/var partition and re-layout the partion.so I did change the /,/usr,/var file system name and I used the /kernel instead of /.
4=After software successfully installation system automatically shutted down and now it is giving error and I am not able to boot the
system.

Regd,
Ajay

 

[bhawani123]

hello Steve,

Can you give me more tips for upgradation?I choosed the preserve mode for installation and slected the existing all partion for preserve but without changing the name of /,/usr,/var it is not accepting for installation.

Regd,
Ajay

 

[harris79]

Ajay

I have just run an upgrade myself to make sure. (2.6 to 7)

If you select upgrade as opposed to initial install, you do not get the preserve option.
The fact that that you want to upgrade what's there, implies that you want to keep your data.

When it's finished the upgrade I will see that the applications still work.

Steve

 

[lfoata]

as Harris79 stated, I believe you chose the install mode instead of upgrade.
I you want to change the partitionning, then do a full install instead of upgrade and then restore your data..

What errors are you getting ?

You can also boot from cdrom and look at the file system. (single user mode). Do you see any missing or empty ? (/etc, var, /usr, ...).

 

[harris79]

My test upgrade went ok, my application Solstice Backup Server has restarted, crontab , hosts files are unchanged.
As both Ifoata and I have said, you must select UPGRADE not INITIAL INSTALL.

Steve

 

[bhawani123]

Thanks,

Again I started installation from cdrom and choosed the upgrade option.
Now everything is fine as well as data.

Thanks everybody.

Regd,

Ajay