Thursday December 15, 2005

I'm up and running with BrandZ as of late last night/early morning (at Starbucks, of course). Looks like BrandZ doesn't require build 28 according to the installation page. I (live) upgraded to build 28 anyway since I wanted to ensure I have a stable image to fall back on and I might as well upgrade to a newer build. I'm a newbie BFU user. I'd be curious if any of you can point me to a resource that explains the impact of a BFU on future updates via live upgrade. I have two slices for Solaris images on my laptop, and before I commit to this newly BFU'd image, I'd like to understand the risks of moving from build28 (with BFU'd BrandZ) to a future build.

Update: Looks like I am not the only one installing BrandZ on my laptop, take a look at what Ed P. is doing.

I do have some notes you may find useful. This is the second(?) time I have live-upgraded with GRUB as my boot manager. Turns out there is a tweak you use if you need to delete an old boot environment on X86 to make space for a new one. You can't delete a boot environment where GRUB is active. Basically, I live upgraded from build 26 to build 27a a while ago. While I am running build 27a, the grub config on my old slice (build 26) was still the active config. Youch! Here are a few steps to resolve the situation (and use at your own risk, consider the steps as "guidelines"). I'd like to say I came up with these steps, but I found someone else's notes.

• First, copy over the grub menu list from the boot environment grub is using:
  # lumount s10b26
  /.alt.s10b26
  s10b26 is the name of my boot environment, replace with your own. The funky ".alt.s10b26" string is output from lumount and is the mount point for the boot environment you specified.
  # mv /.alt.s10b26/boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub
  # luumount s10b26
• Next, tell live upgrade where the GRUB is
  # vi /etc/lu/GRUB_slice
  
  In GRUB_slice, change PHYS_SLICE and LOG_SLICE to point to the raw and block devices of your primary boot environment (most likely currently running boot environment). Here is my GRUB_slice file:
  
  PHYS_SLICE=/dev/rdsk/c0d0s7
  LOG_SLICE=/dev/dsk/c0d0s7
  LOG_FSTYP=ufs
  
  
• Last, but not least, run installgrub to update the boot block (the command below is all one command on one line)
  # /sbin/installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0d0s7
• After that, deleting the old boot environment works just fine:
  # ludelete s10b26

Now what to do with BrandZ. Hmmm. I like Laura's idea of running Quake :)