On 8/24/07, Dave Miner <Dave.Miner at sun.com> wrote: > Robert Milkowski wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Don't you think that pointing smpatch to separate directory for > > backouts would be a good idea? /var/sadm/backout ? or > > /var/sadm/patch/backout/? > > > > Hi Robert, > > Can you expand upon what problem this is meaning to solve?
I've had similar thoughts, but in the context of installing clusters of patches. If I do a quarterly patch update, before the end of the life of a server the backout information will have grown quite large. Once I am running on a given patch set for a quarter, I will not back out to the previous release. As such, I would free up the space used by the previous quarterly patch just before (or after) installing the current quarterly patch. Of course, I can do that without modifying smpatch. Given other discussions about zfs root lately, will it even be necessary for backout information to be kept? It seems as though a snapshot of the appropriate file system(s) before the patch would hold all of the data required to back out the patch. A small amount of metadata would likely need to be kept. As such, if patching went extremely wrong, I could simply roll back to the pre-patch snapshot (snap upgrade boot environment, I guess). If I just want to back out a single patch, it should be able to look at my existing boot environments and bring the original back from a previous boot environment. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
