Madhu K R's Weblog

Tuesday Dec 12, 2006

Simple steps to Upgrade Solaris using Live upgrade

I always wanted to have the latest OS bits running on my system. So when I got my new machine,

First thing I did is to partition the Solaris partition in such a way that I can do Live upgrade.

Live upgrade is a cool technology to upgrade OS on a different slice while the machine is still up and running.

When I partitioned my disk, I created 2 slices s0 and s3 of exact size.

I wanted to use both of these for live upgrade.

1) First I installed build 45 on s0 slice using DVD.

After installation my df -k looked like this

bash-3.00# df -kh -F ufs
Filesystem             size   used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c2d0s0         14G   6.1G   8.2G    43%    /
/dev/dsk/c2d0s4         48G    19G    28G    41%    /space
/dev/dsk/c2d0s3         14G   5.6G   8.7G    39%    /lu
bash-3.00#

Now if I have to install latest solaris build on the slice s3 using Live Upgrade (lu) then first I need to have a base OS. So I copied the s0 to s3 using lucreate

2) #lucreate -c nv_45 -m/:/dev/dsk/c2d0s3:ufs -n nv_50

(This will take atleast 30 minutes. The above command will also create nv_45 Build environment too. This is required only first time.

Make sure that you have unmounted the /lu partition and removed the /lu entry from /etc/vfstab before this step.)

Now run 'lustatus' to make sure that everything is fine.

#lustatus

3) Now put the new build media in cdrom. Or if you have an iso image, then mount it as a filesystem.

In my case I download the iso image and use it.

#lofiadm -a /space/sol-nv-b50-x86-dvd.iso
#mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt/test/

4) remove the following packages from your existing OS

SUNWlur
SUNWluu
SUNWlucfg

and install it from the new DVD/CD image which is mounted on your /mnt/test

5) Now upgrade the slice 3 to new build.

#luupgrade -u -n nv_50 -s /mnt/test

(this will take approximately 30 minutes. It will also update the grub entries so that you can boot in both builds)

Check again the status using command 'lustatus'.

6) Activate to your new build.

# luactivate nv_50

7) Sometimes I have seen that in the new boot environment, bootarchive is not updated.

So mount the new boot environment and update the boot archive..

#lumount nv_50

#/.alt.nv_50/sbin/bootadm update-archive -R /alt.nv_50

(this will update the bootarchive in the new build environment )

Shutdown the system and reboot to choose build 50 From the grub menu.

Now I am happily running build 50 and planning to upgrade my nv_45 (on slice s0 ) environment to build 54.

TO upgrade the build 45 to 54 I have to start from Step 3.

My colleague Arindam helped me a lot in understanding LU.

For more details on LU check this document

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-6396/6n8dosoos?q=Live+upgrade&a=view

Posted at 12:19PM Dec 12, 2006 by madhu in Tech | Comments[0]

Saturday Dec 02, 2006

Photos from FOSS.in 2006

I finally got the time to upload the photos.
It is at
http://picasaweb.google.com/madhu.kr/foss

Posted at 09:00AM Dec 02, 2006 by madhu in Tech | Comments[0]

Friday Sep 29, 2006

Sun University Days in BMS College of Engineering

AST team had conducted a 2 day event in BMS college. It was attended by more than 150 students and lecturers of BMS college.
1/2 day was reserved for opensolaris. Since most of the colleges in India are predominantly Windows users,
We knew that at most 20-25% of the crowd may have some unix knowledge.

So opensolaris talks were spread in 3 section.

1) I gave a first talk on Introduction to Solaris. The idea was to introduce them to Unix world and
get them familiar with Solaris look and feel, introduce some administration commands.

2) Raju SN gave a talk on some advance features of Solaris.
Basically explain students why Solaris is called the Best Operating System on Planet.
In his presentation Raju covered some of the new features of Solaris like SMF, Zones, BrandZ, Dtrace, ZFS, Trusted Extensions, etc..

3) Finally presentation was given by Ganesh Hiregoudar on How to contribute for opensolaris.
By now they would have been impressed by Solaris and features, if they want to contribute, where to look for resources,
which forums, user group they can be part of, What all projects they can do on opensolaris.

All the sessions were quite interactive. There was lot of interest in contributing to opensolaris. Even if we convert 10% of the people who have shown interests join Bosug,
I am sure our Himalaya conference room may not be able to take that many people for Next Bosug meeting.

For more blog Check Abhishek's blog.

Posted at 10:19AM Sep 29, 2006 by madhu in Tech | Comments[0]

Saturday Sep 23, 2006

Another customer sharing his experience on Sun Cluster 3.2 beta.

Another good feedback on Sun Cluster 3.2 beta. Robert Milkowski, System Group Manager has blogged about Sun Cluster 3.2 beta. Check it at http://milek.blogspot.com/

Whats good is that he has also blogged about how to create HA-NFS service on top of a ZFS.

Posted at 10:20PM Sep 23, 2006 by madhu in Tech | Comments[2]

Thursday Aug 17, 2006

A course on Opensolaris and Java to PESIT college

After succesfully conducting opensolaris course for VTU edusat program
http://forum.vtu.ac.in/viewforum.php?f=66&sid=c32263832a2670fc43de488afc19cd88

SunMicrosystems India has made an tie up PESIT college (one of the premiere institute in Bangalore) to conduct a similar course for their students.
As part of this we are conducting a 40 hrs course comprising of
1> opensolaris - Introduction and some details
2> Java .

The students for this course will comprise of top students from various IT related branches of PESIT
who were selected after going through various selection process with in the college.
Courses will be held on every saturday from 9 am - 1 pm starting from August 19th 2006.

The tentetive timetable for this is below...

*Date* *Topics*

19 Aug 2006 Solaris Introduction- Look and feel of Solaris- Shell Programming - Packaging

26 Aug 2006 Introduction to <nop>NetBeans and Sun Studio IDEs

02 Sep 2006 Overview of Java Technologies

09 Sep 2006 Java Programming Fundamentals

23 Sep 2006 Object Oriented Concepts

30 Sep 2006 Java Exception Model

14 Oct 2006 Introduction to Java Threads

28 Oct 2006 Graphical User Interface - AWT and 2D

04 Nov 2006 Graphical User Interface - SWING

11 Nov 2006 Extended Topics

18 Nov 2006 Evolving Core Java Technologies

25 Nov 2006 Tools on Solaris - <nop>DTrace, truss, proc tools, mdb - *stat - modinfo Solaris Internals - Process and process data structures, LWPs

02 Dec 2006 Solaris Internals - Part 2

09 Dec 2006 Solaris Filesystems - SPARC Architerture, Niagara - Lab Tour

Each course will have 2 hours of theory and 2 hours of hands-on immediately after the theory.
So we needed to setup a solaris lab in the college before the start of this program.
Myself and Sheshadri vasudevan from my team went to the college on 16th Aug to help lab administrators of PESIT to setup a solaris lab.

The idea was to install 1st machine with DVD and show them how DVD installation works.
Then configure newly installed machine as jumpstart server and install another machine using jumpstart configuration.
Allow them to install few machines using jumpstart mechanism and make them fell comfortable with whole installation process.
Give some basic tips on adminstrering solaris using SMF framework.

We had got the details of the hardware from their lab incharge Sri Hari before we went to PESIT.
But we forgot to ask was the partition details of the harddisk.
Solaris can be installed only on a primary partition.

In their setup, they had exactly one primary partition (10 gb) on which they had Windows XP.
In remaining 70 GB, they had created extended partition and created lot of logical drives to install Linux.
So first thing we did was to delete all logical partitions and delete extended partition.
Create one more primary partition for solaris (18 gb) and left 50 gb on extended partition.

Now we installed solaris using DVD and then configured the same machine as jumpstart server and installed 6 machines using this jumpstart server.
Sheshadri setup pxeboot environment on that machine and also gave them a quick TOI on pxeboot.
I gave a demo of SMF.

I will soon blog about setting up a jumpstart server to install x86 clients and what I do in my SMF demo.

Posted at 09:56AM Aug 17, 2006 by madhu in Tech | Comments[1]

Monday Dec 12, 2005

Burning CD/DVD in solaris

It is little painful to burn a CD/DVD in Solaris.
I don't know too many applications which can be used to burn DVDs in solaris environment
Even if it is available I am not sure how user friendly it will be

But I discovered that we can burn CD/DVDs easily with few commands
It works and found it little faster than burning DVDs on any application in Windows

Here is what I did

1) Copy all the files you want to burn in a directory
In this case I have moved the files to directory video

2) Make an iso image out of it.
bash-3.00#mkisofs -J -R -o /export/test.iso ./video

3) Test if the iso image works fine by mounting it
bash-3.00# lofiadm -a /export/test.iso
/dev/lofi/1
bash-3.00# mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
bash-3.00# cd /mnt

4) Now insert the media in the drive and burn the cd/dvd.
bash-3.00# cdrw -i /export/test.iso
Looking for CD devices...
Initializing device...done.
Preparing to write DVD
Writing track 1...done.
Finalizing (Can take several minutes)...done.
bash-3.00#

Posted at 06:24PM Dec 12, 2005 by madhu in Tech | Comments[2]