Written by J. Moellenkamp on
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SolarisEnglish
Playing around with Opensolaris 2008.05 Release Candidates
Today, i upgraded my workstations at home to Opensolaris 2008.05 as the primary operating system. Went smoothly. When you don´t have to keep the Nvidia drivers out of your code because of political reasons, even installing and configuring the graphic card is a no-brainer. You have to do nothing. Correct settings out of the box.
ZFS snapshot based boot environments
I´ve started with the Release Candidate 2
Okay, now i´ve updated the package list and started the update of my installation.
A really neat feature of the package manager is the automatic generation of an zfs-snapshot based boot environment:
The update automatically triggers the creation of a new boot-environment and the integration of this boot-environment to GRUB. Next time when you start your system, it will start with this boot environment.
I rebooted here, and after the reboot the operating system came up as a Release Candidate 2a system:
Nice … switching to the old environment is really easy
Now we can reboot again. Et voila, after the reboot you are back in your Release Candidate 2 operating system.
When you look into the list of boot environments, you will see that the both environment swapped their roles.
Of course, you can jump back to the newer installation again.
Reboot the system and afterwards you have your Release Candidate 2a operating system online again.
A nice side effect of snapshot based boot environments
Every now and then even a experienced admin tends to do really dumb errors. Like me …. i´ve accidentally deleted the /etc/hosts:
Fsck! But then i thought: “The system makes snapshots when upgrading packages”. Okay, snapshots are accessible by using the .zfs directory in the root of the filesystem. So i just had to go into a snapshot directory and gather an older /etc/hosts version.
And now i was able to add the hostname in a correct way without deleting it: