Pandemonium Medicine Show

The Two Words : Some relevant advice regarding legacy technology from Bob Newhart.

I've been compiling a list for the last couple of months of legacy technologies that I feel are well past their 'Best Before Date' and should be eliminated. Keeping them around in spite of better alternatives makes all of our jobs more complicated. The reasons for keeping the dead technologies alive end up sounding like delusional rationalizations.

I'm looking for suggestions of obsolete technologies which we would all be better off by getting rid of them. I'm not going to share the complete list I've compiled because I want people to come up with their suggestions. Some ideas to get you started:

• Cylinder/Head/Sector Disk Addressing
• Telnet/rsh/rlogin
• Non-UTF character encodings
• S-Video
• ...

If there's a technology you're forced to use or support that's best destined for the boneyard please make the case for its obsolescence.

With Solaris 10u8 aka Solaris 10 10/09 due any day now I've been planning to upgrade my installations. When I originally installed Solaris 10u6 with ZFS boot I assumed that the upgrade process to 10u7 would be about the same as it has been for UFS boot installations. It turns out, unfortunately, that the Solaris 10 installer doesn't offer direct upgrades for ZFS.

After a few days of fruitlessly searching the Internet for a procedure to upgrade my ZFS boot installation from 10u6 to 10u7 I contacted my Solaris oracle, Dave Clack and, of course he knew exactly how to do it. Since lots of people will undoubtedly need this procedure in the next couple of weeks, here it is. This procedure also works for OpenSolaris. Dave's instructions mount the DVD ISO using lofi loopback. If, like me, you are running you Solaris installations in VirtualBox then you can just mount the image as a virtual DVD. The procedure remains the same with a few path changes.

Upgrade a Solaris 10 ZFS Boot Installation from one "u" level to another

lofiadm -a /share/iso/solaris_dvd.iso mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt pkgrm SUNWlur SUNWluu SUNWluzone SUNWlucfg cd /mnt/Solaris_10/Product pkgadd -d . SUNWlucfg SUNWlur SUNWluu SUNWluzone 10uX is currently installed version 10uY is the version number of the one you downloaded lucreate -c 10uX -n 10uY lustatus luupgrade -u -n 10uY -s /mnt luactivate 10uY init 6

EDIT: removed un-needed SUNWrmvolmgrr step.