IPS Solaris 11

Solaris 11, released on 09-11-2011, has introduced and whole array of new commands and technologies that I am really looking forward to playing with. There's been a replacement of the very buggy live upgrade (lu*) process with beadm, a complete overhaul of the TCP/IP stack, multiple ZFS enhancements and also a few Zone enhancements.

The most notable change for me is the introduction of IPS and the imminent deprecation of SVR4 packages. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with IPS. I understand the theory behind it, but I don't entirely agree with the way it's been implemented. Nevertheless, I have to learn it and I have to use it.

I'm just going outline a few administrative processes which I've used and thought might be helpsome one.

The basic administrative commands are pretty self explanitory:

• pkg search
• pkg install
• pkg update
• pkg contents
• pkg uninstall
  
• etc ....
  

I have setup a local offline repository for testing-- in fact this is probably how I'll end up using the repository for the production systems as none of our unix servers have net access.

The repository can be downloaded from the Oracle website here - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html .There's quite good instructions on the site which explains how to set it up, so I won't bother going through it.

One thing that wasn't documented was the patch method for a repo. As I'm not mirroring the oracle repo, I have to manually patch it myself with the SRUs.
This is done with the 'pkgrevc' command:

# unzip p13399198_1100_SOLARIS64.zip

Archive: p13399198_1100_SOLARIS64.zip

inflating: readme.html

inflating: readme.txt

inflating: sol-11-1111-sru1-incr-repo.iso

# lofiadm -a `pwd`/sol-11-1111-sru1-incr-repo.iso

# mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt/

# pkgrecv -s file:///mnt/repo -d file:///export/Solaris11/repo -m all-versions '*'

You can check your local Vs remote repo with 'pkg search' ( '-r' for remote, '-l' for local )

# pkg info -r entire

Name: entire

Summary: entire incorporation including Support Repository Update (Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 SRU 01). For more information see https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=REFERENCE&id=1372094.1

...

Version: 0.5.11

Build Release: 5.11

Branch: 0.175.0.1.0.4.0

Packaging Date: November 10, 2011 10:56:28 PM

Size: 5.45 kB

FMRI: pkg://solaris/entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.175.0.1.0.4.0:20111110T225628Z

# pkg info -l entire

Name: entire

Summary: Incorporation to lock all system packages to the same build

...

Build Release: 5.11

Branch: 0.175.0.0.0.2.0

Packaging Date: October 20, 2011 02:38:22 PM

Size: 5.45 kB

FMRI: pkg://solaris/entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.0:20111020T143822Z

Then upgrade with 'pkg upgrade -vn' ( always do a dummy run ) then 'pkg upgrade -v'.


You can also check your repository information using 'pkgrepo':

# pkgrepo info -s file:///export/Solaris11_repo/repo/

PUBLISHER PACKAGES STATUS UPDATED

solaris 4292 online 2011-11-18T04:47:31.737612Z