Wandering Thoughts archives

Why I'm not really interested in Solaris's Live Upgrade stuff

Solaris Live Upgrade is one of those things that I would like to love, but I can't seem to get interesting in, and here's why.

First, as I've written before, we don't patch our Solaris machines. They're only accessible internally and they're effectively black-box appliances; there's very little enthusiasm here for patching a working appliance.

When we do patch our Solaris machines, we never need to roll back patches because we test them first in a test environment. We have no choice about this; we cannot possibly deploy an untested patch into a production environment, fast reversion or no. (Sadly our experience with Solaris patches is that we definitely do have to test them.)

(Also, we don't patch machines in single-user mode regardless of what the Solaris patches claim to require; in fact we just apply all of our patches through pca.)

Solaris LU couldn't save us from a server downtime either. Even with LU you need to reboot the machine in order to activate your new patches, and rebooting a fileserver always requires a formal downtime (which is one reason that we don't have very much of an urge to patch fileservers unless it is really important).

(I've written before about how we do fast OS upgrades. LU might make those simpler, but it does so at the cost of making an upgraded machine subtly different from a machine that we (re)install from scratch, unless we make (re)installs take even longer than they already do.)

I admit that I would feel more interested in just exploring Solaris LU if it hadn't already hung on me once or twice. I have a very low tolerance for bad behavior from tools like Live Upgrade; any bugs are generally enough to make me give up on the tool entirely (for reasons that don't fit in this entry).

Where to find the Illumos source repository

I know, the Illumos people are busy. But it still makes me grumpy that it is a several-step process (which sort of requires JavaScript) to get from their web page to find out where the Illumos equivalent of the OpenSolaris source repository (theoretically) is.

(I say theoretically because it is not responding for me right now.)

This process might go faster if you are already immersed in the arcana of OpenSolaris development, but I wasn't. Since I was looking at the source code for diagnostic purposes, I ignored almost all of the OpenSolaris development stuff and terminology.

(Not that looking at Illumos source is really useful for me right now, but given that Illumos is the future of OpenSolaris, I want to keep track of it.)

For my future reference if nothing else, here are the relevant links:

• the Illumos version of OpenSolaris's code base is called illumos-gate. Build instructions, including information on where the actual source repository is, are here.

• the Mercurial repository that is analogous to OpenSolaris's onnv-gate is (theoretically) at http://hg.illumos.org/illumos-gate/

  Update: it's been pointed out to me (see comments) that the ssh version of this is faster and more reliable; the Mercurial repo identifier for this is ssh://anonhg@hg.illumos.org/illumos-gate

  You can't browse it online, but for that there are versions on github and bitbucket.org (see comments for URLs).

• the Illumos FAQ.

I've linked to the FAQ because it isn't directly accessible from the front page if you do not have JavaScript enabled. Sadly, the result of enabling JavaScript is that it exposes a wretched page design, where sometimes you get some important links at the top center of the page and sometimes you get a set of sponsor logos. To make it worse the two alternatives result in a different sized content box, causing other page content to jump up and down when the JavaScript decides to switch back and forth.

(I will award the Illumos people bonus points for making a https version of their site available and in fact pointing many links at it.)