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System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration

Chapter 33 Troubleshooting Software Package Problems (Tasks)

This chapter describes problems you may encounter when installing or removing software packages. There are two sections: Specific Software Package Installation Errors, which describes package installation and administration errors you might encounter, and General Software Package Installation Problems, which describes behavioral problems that might not result in a particular error message.

This is a list of information in this chapter.

For information about managing software packages, see “Managing Software (Overview)” in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

Troubleshooting Software Package Symbolic Link Problems

In previous Solaris releases, there was no way to specify a symbolic link target in the pkgmap file when creating a software package. This meant a package or patch-related symbolic link was always followed to the source of the symbolic link rather than to the target of the symbolic link when a package was added with the pkgadd command. This created problems when upgrading a package or a patch package that needed to change a symbolic link target destination to something else.

Now, the default behavior is that if a package needs to change the target of a symbolic link to something else, the target of the symbolic link and not the source of the symbolic link is inspected by the pkgadd command.

Unfortunately, this means that some packages may or may not conform to the new pkgadd behavior.

The PKG_NONABI_SYMLINKS environment variable might help you transition between the old and new pkgadd symbolic link behaviors. If this environment variable is set to true, pkgadd follows the source of the symbolic link.

Setting this variable enables a non-conforming package to revert to the old behavior if set by the administrator before adding a package with the pkgadd command.

The new pkgadd symbolic link behavior might cause an existing package to fail when added with the pkgadd command. You might see the following error message in this situation:


unable to create symbolic link to <path>

If a package doesn't install due to this problem, do the following:

  1. If this is a Sun-supplied package, call the Resolution Center and report the non-conforming package name.

  2. Set the PKG_NONABI_SYMLINKS environment variable and try adding the package with the pkgadd command again.


    # PKG_NONABI_SYMLINKS=true
# export PKG_NONABI_SYMLINKS
# pkgadd pkg-name

Specific Software Package Installation Errors


WARNING: filename <not present on Read Only file system>

Reason Error Occurred 

How to Fix the Problem 

This error message indicates that not all of a package's files could be installed. This usually occurs when you are using pkgadd to install a package on a client. In this case, pkgadd attempts to install a package on a file system that is mounted from a server, but pkgadd doesn't have permission to do so.

If you see this warning message during a package installation, you must also install the package on the server. See “Managing Software (Overview)” in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration for details.

General Software Package Installation Problems

Reason Error Occurred 

How to Fix the Problem 

There is a known problem with adding or removing some packages developed prior to the Solaris 2.5 release and compatible versions. Sometimes, when adding or removing these packages, the installation fails during user interaction or you are prompted for user interaction and your responses are ignored.  

Set the following environment variable and try to add the package again. 

NONABI_SCRIPTS=TRUE