I support a number of deployments, each one potentially being made up of a different subset of components. As things stand this poses a proplem for rolling out patches and OS upgardes.
Each server potentially has a different set of packages, excluding the OS ones but none of the packages are in themselves depenedent on the OS. I would like to make the root disk as independent of the deployed application set as possible so that I would be able to use live upgrade [b]with flar[/b] to deploy patches and OS upgrades where these are needed for support of new hardware eg. new IBs/SBs in a sunfire mid/high server. To that end I am looking at making a second copy of the packaging tools customized to put the /var/sadm information in an alternate location for these packages and update the install scripts which drive the installations to use these instead of the existing ones. Since these packages do not check the existing system for other dependencies it should be feasible, also this would allow me to instrument the installed revisions of my packages without having to filter the the OS packages, and in the case of a complete server failure, simply deploying my standard OS image to a new machine and plugging in the external storage should get me back up and running with minimal downtime, and almost no loss of data. Please do not respone with something like "couldn't you use the -R option for the commands", becasue the answer to that is no, this does not achieve what I want. I've been through the code for the packaging tools and have recompiled with updates, however the tools are still working against the default locations, so I guess there are other libraries I need to update, eg libadm. Does anyone know the full list of packages that have an impact here? I can go through it and figure out what needs to be done, but It would save me a lot of time if I could ignore some of the linked libraries. This message posted from opensolaris.org
