On 03/25 14:20, Kelly Sauke wrote: > Maybe I need a little clarification of what Live Upgrade does. I've > gotten a lot of response of what I would call installer utilities > but not a Live Upgrade (if I'm wrong please point it out to > me). What Live Upgrade does under solaris is it creates a complete > alternate boot environment with a root /usr /var and any other > filesystem you want. Then you can apply patches etc to this other > boot environment and boot off of that. If there is something in the > patch that doesn't work or screws up the machine, then you just > reboot off the original boot environment and you're back to where > you were before upgrading and still have access to the patched boot > environment to fix it. Its great for upgrading production type > servers because the 'back out plan' if you will is nothing more than > reboot off the old boot environment. In other words you have 2 / > filesystems, 2 /usr's, 2 /var's as well as 2 kernels. Its a > complete boot environment copy that you can do anything to and then > just reboot off the new environment without having to touch the > 'live' environment.
I think most of the people that have responded to this thread have missed the point. Yea, rpm, apt, portage, blah, blah are good package management utilities, but we are talking apples and oranges (or chalk and cheese :) ). LIve Upgrade gives you a backout plan, which rpm, apt, et al, do not. Sun did not release LU to replace the pkg* commands. apt, for instance, does not allow you to downgrade. I tried this in the past, and found that it wont work, please correct me if I am wrong. What happens after you run apt-get distupgrade and everything is hosed? Recover from backups of course, but this can be time consuming, especially if you need to reinstall the OS beforehand. I have used SystemImager [1] and I think this would give you more Live Upgrade type utility. You would be able to create your updated OS on a separate machine, then create an image. You can have multiple images, so you could easily revert back, voila instant backout plan. Granted, this will not give you parallel installations on the machine, but this, IMHO, gives you the ability to revert the known good state as fast as you can reimage the system. -James Relavent links: [1] http://www.systemimager.org/ -- <t f l a t @ a s t r o c r e e p . n e t> (http://)?(www\.)?astrocreep\.net OpenPGP FingerPrint: D389 B84E DA38 838D 41A9 1261 43B2 1676 9E65 DB08 OpenPGP Key: 9E65DB08
