Patching a Solaris System using Live Upgrade

Updated   Read time 1 min 37 sec(s)   (1119 views).  Solaris  

One of the most common uses of Solaris Live Upgrade is to minimise downtime for patching. Upgrading to a newer Solaris release is a relatively infrequent activity in comparison to patching a system.

Depending on the length of your maintenance window and the need to minimise downtime, patching an alternate boot environment may be an advantageous operations choice.

The steps to patch a Solaris system using Live Upgrade are:

  • Create a new boot environment
  • Patch the new boot environment
  • Boot from the new boot environment

Solaris Live Upgrade has the advantage of applying the patches in the background with little impact on what is running on the system.

To begin, follow these steps:

NOTE: Before upgrading, you must install the Solaris Live Upgrade packages from the release to which you are upgrading.
  1. Obtain the patches — Access the recommended patch cluster for Solaris 10 from http://sunsolve.sun.com. Look for the recommended patch clusters menu and select either the "Solaris 10" choice or the "Solaris 10 x86" choice.
  2. Run the lucreate command to create a copy of the active boot environment.
  3. (optionally) Run the luupgrade if you wish to upgrade the Solaris release before patching
  4. Unpack the downloaded file. For this example, we assume you have downloaded the 10_Recommended.zip patches file to /var/tmp. 
    # cd /var/tmp
# unzip 10_Recommended.zip
  5. Make sure you are in the patch directory: 
    # cd /var/tmp/10_Recommended
  6. Patch the inactive Boot Environment: 
    # luupgrade -n s10b2 -s /var/tmp/10_Recommended -t `cat patch_order`
    In the above example, we specify s10b2 as our alternate boot environment.
  7. Indicate which boot environment is to be used the next time you reboot: 
    # luactivate s10b2
    where s10b2 is the boot environment you want to make active.
  8. Reboot the system: 
    # init 6

The above is a very simple example on how to use Solaris Live Upgrade for patching.

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