Installation Enhancements

Solaris Live Upgrade 2.1

Solaris Live Upgrade provides a method of upgrading a system while the system continues to operate. While your current boot environment is running, you can duplicate the boot environment, then upgrade the duplicate. Or, rather than upgrading, you can install a Solaris Flash archive on a boot environment. The original system configuration remains fully functional and unaffected by the upgrade or installation of an archive. When you are ready, you can activate the new boot environment by rebooting the system. If a failure occurs, you have a safety net. You can quickly revert to the original boot environment with a simple reboot. Thus, you eliminate the normal downtime of the test and evaluation process.

New features in Solaris Live Upgrade 2.1 provide the following new functionality.

• Solaris Live Upgrade uses Solaris Volume Manager technology to create a duplicate boot environment that contains file systems with RAID-1 volumes (mirrors). The mirror provides data redundancy for any file systems including the root (/) file system. With the lucreate command, you can create mirrored file systems that contain up to three submirrors.

• You can now use the JumpStart installation method to create an empty boot environment when you install the Solaris operating environment. The empty boot environment can then be populated with a Solaris Flash archive for later use.

• When creating a boot environment with the lucreate command, you can now exclude some files and directories that would normally be copied from the original boot environment. If you have excluded a directory, you can also include specified files and subdirectories under that directory.

For further information, see the Solaris 9 Installation Guide.

Solaris Flash Archives

The Solaris Flash installation feature enables you to use a single reference installation of the Solaris operating environment on a system, which is called the master system. Then, you can replicate that installation on a number of systems, which are called clone systems. The installation is an initial installation that overwrites all files on the clone system.

In the Solaris 9 4/03 Update release, the Solaris Flash installation feature provides new enhancements for differential archives and configuration scripts.

• A Solaris Flash installation can now update a clone system with minor changes. If you have a clone system and want to update it with minor changes, you can create a differential archive that contains only the differences between two images, the original master image and an updated master image. When you update a clone system with a differential archive, only the files that are specified in the differential archive are changed. The installation is restricted to clone systems that contain software which is consistent with the original master image. You use the custom JumpStart^TM installation method to install a differential archive on a clone system. Or, you can use Solaris Live Upgrade to install a differential archive on a duplicate boot environment.

• Special scripts can now be run for configuration of the master or clone or can be run to validate the archive. These scripts enable you to do the following:

  • Configure applications on clone systems. You can use a custom JumpStart script for some uncomplicated configurations. For more complicated configurations, special configuration file processing might be necessary on the master system or before or after installation on the clone system. Also, local preinstallation and postinstallation scripts can reside on the clone and protect local customizations from being overwritten by the Solaris Flash software.

  • Identify nonclonable, host-dependent data that enables you to make the flash archive host independent. Host independence is enabled by modifying such data or excluding it from the archive. An example of host-dependent data is a log file.

  • Validate software integrity in the archive during creation.

  • Validate the installation on the clone system.

For further information, see the Solaris 9 Installation Guide. This guide also includes information on how to use Solaris Live Upgrade to install a differential archive.

In the Solaris 9 12/02 Update release, you can customize contents in a Solaris Flash Archive. The flarcreate command is used to create a Solaris Flash archive. This command has been updated with new options that increase your flexibility to define archive contents when creating an archive. You now can exclude more than one file or directory. From an excluded directory, you can add back a subdirectory or file. This feature is useful when you want to exclude large data files that you do not want cloned.

For information on how to use these options, see the Solaris 9 Installation Guide.

In the Solaris 9 Update releases, note the following name change:

Solaris Flash (formerly Web Start Flash)

Command-Line Interface Enhancements to the Solaris Product Registry

The prodreg command has been updated to include functionality that is similar to the Solaris Product Registry graphical user interface. You can now use the following prodreg subcommands on the command line or in administration scripts to perform a variety of tasks.

• browse – The browse subcommand enables you to view registered software in a terminal window. By repeating the browse subcommand, you can navigate through the directory hierarchy of registered software.

• info – The info subcommand enables you to view information about registered software. You can use the info subcommand to identify the following:

  • Installation location of the software

  • Other software that the specified software requires

  • Other software that depends on the specified software

  • Software that has been damaged by the removal of packages that the software requires

• unregister – The unregister subcommand removes software installation information from the Solaris Product Registry. If you remove software from your system without properly uninstalling the software from the Registry, you can use the prodreg unregister command to clean up the obsolete entries in the Solaris Product Registry.

• uninstall – The uninstall subcommand enables you to remove registered software from your system by launching that software's uninstall program.

For more information, see the prodreg(1M) man page and the System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

Support for LDAP Version 2 Profiles

The Solaris installation programs now support LDAP Version 2 profiles. These profiles enable you to configure your system to use a proxy credential level. During the Solaris Web Start or suninstall programs, you can specify the LDAP proxy-bind distinguished name and proxy-bind password. With any installation method, you can preconfigure LDAP before installation by using the proxy_dn and proxy_password keywords in the sysidcfg file.

For information, see the Solaris 9 Installation Guide.