On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 02:54:27PM -0700, Myers, Mike wrote: > We've used it for OS upgrades (where the unencapsulation is pretty handy since we're upgrading the Veritas software as well), but for patching there's too much post-patch work that's "hard" (eg. not easily automated). We just do flash archives of the system before patching and offer a restore from that to the system owner if there's problems. Mostly it's less painful to figure out the issue and fix it on the application side than to go back (knowing that you'll have to move forward on patching eventually anyways).
That works as well. I've used the "pull-a-disk" method quite a bit, but I originally didn't do it for patching per se. I had an E10000 with 5 domains on it. We were doing SAN configuration changes and the first 4 went great. The last one was horrible. The changes didn't actually "fail", but it caused the machine to take about 75 minutes to boot in some cases. So backing out the changes in reasonable time meant rebooting to an alternate environment. In addition, the machine had no CD-rom, and at the time you couldn't successfully jumpstart from a 'ge' interface (fixed later). So it was painful to boot from anything other than the installed root. The "pull-a-disk" meant I could have two separate boot environments via a VxVM root mirror, syncing occasionally and being able to back out of changes rapidly. Worked very well for that. I generally use it when I have a VxVM root mirror, I can pull the disk easily, I expect that things will go well, but I have a tight window for downtime. If things fail, I know I'm back up very rapidly and we can think about why we had problems later. Not having to do any configuration changes on VxVM to execute a backout makes the method fast and in some ways, less error prone. It's certainly not without its dangers though. Backups are always recommended to reduce the gremlin playfield. -- Darren Dunham [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Technical Consultant TAOS http://www.taos.com/ Got some Dr Pepper? San Francisco, CA bay area < This line left intentionally blank to confuse you. > _______________________________________________ Veritas-vx maillist - Veritas-vx@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-vx
