How to uninstall a Solaris zone in an incomplete state

Published   Read time 1 min 38 sec(s)   (3784 views).  Solaris  

Have you ever fallen into a trap of cloning a zone and for one reason or another the cloning fails which leaves the clone in an incomplete state? Well I have, and the most common cause was not providing enough diskspace for the cloned zone :-(

# zoneadm -z perky clone pinky
Copying /zones/pinky...zoneadm: zone 'perky': 'copy' failed with exit code 255.
The copy failed.
More information can be found in /var/log/zoneAAABtaajS

# tail /var/log/zoneAAABtaajS
cpio: Cannot open/create "/zones/perky/dev/arp", errno 28, No space left on device
cpio: Cannot open/create "/zones/perky/dev/.devlink_db_lock", errno 28, No space left on device
cpio: Cannot open/create "/zones/perky/dev/.devlink_db", errno 28, No space left on device
cpio: Cannot open/create "/zones/perky/dev/.devfsadm_dev.lock", errno 28, No space left on device
cpio: Cannot create directory "/zones/perky/dev", errno 28, No space left on device
cpio: Cannot chown() "/zones/perky/dev", errno 2, No such file or directory
cpio: Unable to reset modification time for "dev", errno 2, No such file or directory
cpio: Cannot chmod() "/zones/perky/dev", errno 2, No such file or directory
11730288 blocks
78907 error(s)

If we checkout the zone, we see that my new zone (perky) is in an incomplete state:

# zoneadm list -cv
  ID NAME             STATUS     PATH                           BRAND    IP
   0 global           running    /                              native   shared
  13 cobra            running    /zones/cobra                   native   shared
  14 asp              running    /zones/asp                     native   shared
   - pinky           installed  /zones/pinky                  native   shared
   - perky          incomplete /zones/perky                 native   shared

The only solution I've found to clear an incomplete zone is to force an uninstall of the zone:

# zoneadm -z perky uninstall -F
WARNING: Unable to completely remove /zones/perky
because it contains additional user data.  Only the standard directory
entries have been removed.

and finally delete the zone:

# zonecfg -z perky delete
Are you sure you want to delete zone perky (y/[n])? y

and start again, once I've generated enough disk space for the new clone :-)