SUMMARY: downgrade OS to end user support

From: Stefan Voss (s.voss@terradata.de)
Date: Tue Jun 01 1999 - 01:57:24 CDT


ORIGINAL QUESTION:

Hi list,

maybe this was discussed on this list before, but I could not find it in the
archive...

I have a SPARC 10 running Solaris 2.5.1. When I installed the OS, I installed
the full OS, not knowing, what I did (it was my second Solaris 2.x install...).
Now the machine must be upgraded to 2.6 and there is nearly no free disk space
to do the upgrade. Of courcse, I could do a fresh install (with only end user
support), but an upgrade seems better to me.

Because I need only end user support on this machine, my idea is as follows: I
do a pkginfo on this machine (call it X), do a pkginfo on another machine (call
it Y), make a diff on the output and remove all packages, which are installed
only on machine X to free the disks there.

Question: is this safe to do ???

SUMMARY:

Thanks go to:

   Casper Dik <casper@holland.sun.com>
   Vilain, Sam <sam.vilain@nz.unisys.com>
   Greg Polanski <greg_polanski@adc.com>
   Jeff Kennedy <jeff.kennedy@natdecsys.com>
   dana@dtn.com
   Matt Simmons <simmonmt@acm.org>

The general consensus is: it is safe.

But there are some more points, which one should take into account:

1. it was suggested to upgrade by hand and then deselect all unwanted packages.

2. It is safe, but you may end up with stale configuration files (ie, not all
files will be removed). See if you can get it as low as our record (30MB for
Solaris 2.6 :))

3. Although it might be safe, it was suggested to better do a new installation -
this ensures that everything will be ok.

4. Take a look at /var/sadm/system/admin/.clustertoc and see what packages are
listed under SUNWCuser and remove anything else.

5. Ensure you clean up /var as well.

6. You need to edit /var/sadm/system/admin/CLUSTER to say SUNWCuser instead of
SUNWCXall (or SUNWCall, depending on which entire you installed).

However, I wanted to do the upgrade because I needed it for a new software
release. Now that I got the manuals, I see, that the software is certified only
for Ultra 60 and Enterprise servers (at least, if it is not certified for Sprac
10, I would have expected it to be certified for Ultra 1 or Ultra 2 too...
suprise, surprise). So I will do the upgrade on the Ultras first and then I will
see, whether it makes sense to upgrade the small machines or not.

Thank you all anyway.

                Stefan
                
                

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