[H-GEN] Why does solaris...

[ben.carlyle at invensys.com]

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a) Require /opt to be mounted to do an fsck, and drop to the boot prompt 
if it can't find the file?
b) Require /opt to be mounted to do a boot -r?

Hello :)

I've had this gripe for about a week now and I've only gotten access to my 
mail today. I've been on a customer site in Hong Kong, and found these 
lovely features apparently both in Solaris 2.5.1 and 8. It's easy to find 
these problems. Just bring along a new disk to a customer site with the 
intention of using the old disk as a rollback if any problems are 
encountered with the new build. Move the existing disk from slot 0 to slot 
1, then put your new disk into slot 0 as it's been configured in the 
factory. Boot up, mount the root filesystem of the original disk and edit 
the vfstab to point at c0t1d0s* for each of the relevant slices. Boot 
disk1, and oops. The machine falls in a heap because there's no device 
called /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s6, so usr can't be mounted. Because there's no fsck 
the machine won't go into single user mode, and if you think you can use 
boot -r to get the device created then think again. Oh no! You've only got 
an hour and a half total between the hours of 2:30 and 4am to get the 
whole job done including testing, and you thought this bit would be easy 
so you only allocated 15-20 minutes to boot back to the old disk and make 
sure it's working! Dammit :)

That's my gripe. In future I'll be recommending that /usr and / be 
installed on the same slice, since Sun clearly don't have the concept of a 
root slice that is able to operate well enough to fix the system in case 
of emergencies. Obvously in their mind it's time to bring out the rescue 
tape and fix it from a ram-disk when such events occur...

Anyway :)

Benjamin.


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