Paul Scott: X86

Svm is a stable and solid product borne from years of development work yet there seems to be a great many calls raised when trying to patch a machine when it has Solaris X86 installed.along with svm. For the most part this is trivial and almost always successful in the Sparc world yet it seems to give no end of trouble in x86 land.

So here's a list of things that seem to work (for me at least)
Here's a brief resume of the machine:

Solaris 10 05/08 127128-11
grub 0.95 (standard for Sun)
patch 137112-08

1).check you can boot from the mirror (important)
2).go back to underlying devices
make a backup of these files!
strip out /etc/systems md portions
modify mount points for /etc/vfstab   
update the boot archive
3).boot single user (from grub "multiboot -s")
4).clear out metadevices, do a quick metastat just to make sure no metadevices are seen
5).start the patching process
6).some patches will leave /reconfigure created, be aware of that in case you have disks pulled.
7).update the bootarchive, though reboot is almost certain to do this anyway
8).reboot multiuser
make sure before re-encapsulating the disks (with svm) that all appears well. Do all the applications appear to be running? can this machine run as it used to?
9).encapsulate disks using svm
make sure you run metaroot and modify /etc/vfstab, ensure vfstab is mirroring both the root disk and swap
10).reboot multiuser.

if any fsck's are required during any of this, make sure you do not do that on underlying devices when svm is running, always remember where you are and what state your system is in.

11).make sure you check dumpadm, you might need it at some point.
12).notes:
patching (at least 137112-08) now seems to require a password, this password is found in the cluster readme file. it seems that this may be the way forward, so now you really do need to read the README.

Getting svm out of the way is important, at least if only to break the mirrors and pull the mirror from the machine.
Depending on what you pull you may need to modify bootenv.rc to cope with a new hardware path, I don't think you should but you should know it's a possibility.

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Patch 137138-09 has a few problems, Check these sun alerts out before you start patching. One of them you need to have a support contract for but the rest are Public.

246206    Public
246207    Public
245626    Public
248126    Support contract required
250426    Public

Enter these search terms in sunsolve for information on patches you should have installed already.

"Install and Patch Utilities Patch"
"patch behavior patch"
"umountall patch"

Your version of Solaris may not need them, But check anyway. And the one caveat that I assume you always know to do is; "READ THE README".

BIG NOTE

A Sun Alert 257908 has been released today(05/05/2009) which covers the issues encountered when adding patch 137138-09; and the hanging problems. The essence of it is as follows

Workaround
svcadm enable -rst network/rpc/meta:default before adding the patch.

OR patches to apply before this patch
119255-58 or later and 125556-03 or later

If you want to know more then look the Sun Alert up on Sunsolve.
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