So earlier this week the new OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released in conjunction with CommunityOne in San Francisco.  The new stable release of OpenSolaris snv_111b is hot off the presses and is getting good reviews.  It was actually selected as a release candidate the week before, but I’m sure Sun wanted to promote it during the CommunityOne festivities.  I’m a two days late with this entry, but better late than never.

Upgrade The Server

My home NAS server I’ve been using for quite a while which I just migrated to OpenSolaris 2008.11 was doing just fine, but I wanted to have the latest build as I intend to try building OpenSolaris from scratch in the next few weeks and wanted to be up-to-date.  After all it took me a year to get migrated to the latest version a few weeks ago, so I figured, why wait this time.

The upgrade was a snap.  However, the usual disclaimers apply when doing this as when doing anything as root.  Usual disclaimers apply, please read “the fine print.”

I went to Sun’s web site and found the section on upgrading an existing install to OpenSolaris install 2009.06 and it really couldn’t have been simpler.  Before trying this out on my live server, even though be’s (boot environments) and zfs rollback works like a charm, I built a virtual machine in VirtualBox and installed OpenSoalris 2008.11 just to be safe.   I did the following from the command line:

1. ‣pfexec su -
   

2. ‣pkg install -v SUNWipkg
   

3. ‣pkg image-update -v
   

4. ‣init 6
   

That’s it and I’m now up and running the latest version of OpenSolaris 2009.06.

I have to say it did take a little bit of time due to the extra load the Sun servers were having to deal with due to the enthusiasm of people wanting to upgrade and download.  I did add the “-v” option for verbose because I wanted to see what it was doing while it was doing it and it gave me something to watch during the upgrade.  In all, it took about 30-45 minutes due to slow response times and load on the servers.

One side note, I’ve only found one problem with the upgrade, but it was simple enough to fix and didn’t notice it until today.

This is easily fixed by issuing a catman -w to rebuild the whatis database.

UPDATE: 10 June 2009 - Did find one more things which needs to be done after upgrade.  Any disk pools you have will most likely be on a lower version of ZFS.  I only noticed this because I wanted to scrub the disks after a less than graceful shutdown and checked the status of the pools.  Very easy to take care of using the zfs upgrade command.

Pools are then updated.  So simply:

1. •Check the pools on the machine: zpool upgrade
   

2. •Check the ZFS versions available in your installation: zpool upgrade -v
   

3. •Upgrade and repeat for each pool: zpool upgrade poolname
   

A Couple Of Extras

I’m very much a command line person and have been for a long time.  I’m not particularly fond of GUI’s, I don’t like watching the little orange bar moving across my screen while the system is booting.  Bad things sometimes happen during this process and you can be stuck staring at the graphical boot for a very long time. So, when I’m booting, this is what my /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst file looks like.  My changes highlighted in blue:

Notice, I’m using the 4th boot entry (indicated by “default 3”, the first is “0”) and I also don’t like waiting so I set the timeout on the GRUB screen to 5 seconds which is plenty of time to select something else if I need to.  Also, I’ve added the “-v” verbose option to the kernel so I have something to look at while it’s booting.  It just gives me a warm feeling to see the machine “doing something” at boot and this is a “headless” server most of the time anyway.

In all, I’m very pleased with how smoothly the upgrade went.  Many thanks go out to everyone who helped build, test and package this great operating system.

Get OpenSolaris 2009.06snv_111b now.