Thanks to all the people who replied to my question concerning the SunOS 4.1.1 upgrade.
Here is my original question:
>> We are planning to upgrade all our machines to SunOS 4.1.1 either next week or
>> sometime in Feb. next year. The decision of go or no go depends on number of
>> sites who have installed the 4.1.1 already. The reason this is an important
>> issue is that our on site Sun tech support is not ready to support us yet because
>> he just got his tape couple days ago and he has not received the Support Contract.
>> Also, if we run into trouble during the upgrade process, we know how many people
>> has done the upgrade and can give us some helps.
>>
>> So, if you have the upgrade already, please drop me a mail. If you are kind enough,
>> please drop me some helpful hints about the upgrade, especially in the area of
>> incorporating the last version's stuff. For instance, if I have a third party
>> vendor's hardware, how can I configure into our new kernel? Do I have to start
>> from scratch again or the upgrade process take care of it for me already.
>>
>> This is our first major upgrade, so helpful hints are very welcome.
>>
>> Configuration: 2 Sun3, 3 Sun4 and more than 20 Sparcstation1. All running SunOS 4.0.3
Among all the replies that I received, there is only one person told me that he has
installed the 4.1.1. I guess it is a new release and not too many people has chance
to try it out yet. Given the situation (and internal politic), we decided to postpone
the event till sometime next year.
Summary:
>> From: yih%atom@cs.utah.edu (Benny Yih)
>>
>> Since this is suppose to be a full install, I'd suggest picking a
>> single box w/ disks to try 1st. Full install probably means rebuilding your
>> custom kernel also. We've not moved up yet, so I don't have the full scoop.
>>
>> luck, benny
>>
>> From: brendan@cs.widener.edu (Brendan Kehoe)
>>
>> First, I haven't done 4.1.1 yet -- I'd love to hear what you find out.
>> As far as generic installs go, I can help you a bit there. I had to
>> do the upgrade from 4.0.3 to 4.1 (on four Sparc1's). My suggestions are:
>>
>> 1) Print out everything that's important in /etc. Including:
>> aliases bootparams defaultdomain ethers
>> fstab ftpusers* gettytab group
>> hostname.??0 hosts hosts.equiv hosts.lpd*
>> inetd.conf named.boot netgroup netmasks
>> networks passwd printcap rc.anything
>> remote resolv.conf sendmail.cf services
>> shells* svdtab syslog.conf ttytab
>> [Those with * may not be there]
>> Note that for a lot of these, you can omit the ones
>> that you didn't modify. Basically you want to make sure
>> you get everything that you did that Sun won't.
>>
>> VERY important are your diskless clients' ethernet & ip #'s for when
>> you do the server. Have 'em right there.
>>
>> 1a) If you're running DNS, print out alla that stuff. If
>> you're running YP & edited the Makefile at all, get that.
>>
>> 2) If you've got yourself sym-linked to death, draw a little
>> map so you can re-build the hierarchy you have. (For example,
>> /usr/unbundled is my biggest filesystem; /usr/spool/news points
>> to /usr/u/news, /usr/local points to /usr/u/local, etc.)
>>
>> 3) Make a full backup with the newest tapes ya can. After the
>> install is done, you'll be restoring everything off of these.
>> Anything that uses kernel routines (shows you info about any
>> processes, for example) will have to be built. A couple that
>> come to mind are sps and top.
>>
>> 4) If you don't have how the disks were partitioned before 4.1
>> was installed, check in /etc/install. The files disk_info.xxx
>> will give you the info you'll need when you do 4.1.1's disk
>> menu. (This doesn't count if you want to repartition your
>> drives. If you're lacking for swap or whatever, now's the time
>> to get it.)
>>
>> 5) Make sure you read the RTF that came with the tapes.
>>
>> 6) Do servers before clients. Basically your whole net will be
>> cut out while you do this. If somebody gives you a better method
>> I'm interested in it.
>>
>> 7) I had some trouble getting my dataless clients to boot. What
>> happened is I got the miniroot loaded on partition b of the
>> client's disk, then right after I got done with the dd command
>> it panic'd. After some sh*tting bricks, I finally realized that
>> it was ok, since it's not gonna be using what it just used. (It
>> boot off of the server as a diskless client.) Ignore the panic
>> and just boot the mother off of the partition..oh yeah, it's
>> ok to swap off of the root partition for that amount of time.
>>
>> Whelp, I hope at least some of this helps you! And good luck! Fill
>> me in on how it goes if ya decide to do it this month.
>>
>> --
>> Brendan Kehoe - Widener Sun Network Manager - brendan@cs.widener.edu
>> Widener University in Chester PA A Bloody Sun-vs-Dec War Zone
>> Hey ... do you think George Bush carries money or any kind of ID with him?
>>
>> From: brian@cimage.com (Brian Kelley)
>>
>> I just upgraded 6 Sparcstations from 4.0.3c & 4.1 to 4.1.1. They were all
>> diskfull machines, having 660 meg shoeboxes, most without tape drives. All
>> user files were stored under a /`hostname` directory.
>>
>> It went mostly without incident.
>>
>> There were a number of changes that were made on the hosts.
>>
>>
>> 4.1.1 was said to have a much faster filesystem. I wasn't sure if my 4.1
>> filesystems needed to be remade to take advantage of the new speed or not.
>> I might have been able to save time by not remaking the filesystems on my
>> 4.1 hosts. I chose to back the disks up and remake everything on all of'em.
>>
>> We were fortunate enough to have a enough free disk space to be able to back
>> up 500 meg, saving the time it would have taken to write it to tape (and it
>> takes longer to check your backup with the tape, and you really should make
>> two backups... ). You can use dump or GNU tar to do your backup. I chose
>> GNU tar because I was fairly confident that I could make it restore my files
>> no matter what (and I had source). I verified the backups by doing a table
>> of contents.
>>
>> I used a shoebox with just a tape drive to install the five machines that
>> didn't have tape drives. The installation was trivial and there were no
>> problems.
>>
>> I have a shell script that configures a Sun (quite a highly localized kludge,
>> I might add). It requires I login as root, make two directories and mount
>> two NFS drives. A few things are done by hand (rc.local changes) at the
>> suggestion of the script. Then you basically reboot the machine and restore
>> the user's files. That turned out to be trivial.
>>
>> We also began using the tmpfs facility in 4.1.1. It existed (barely) in 4.1
>> but it was really slow. I added an additional 12 megs of swap to take care
>> of any spillage from /tmp.
>>
>>
>> PROBLEMS
>>
>> We don't have many sophisticated UNIX users at our site (most are from the
>> DOS world). Only one was using cron to do things at night. I missed saving
>> crontab files on the hosts. It was part of the install for root, but not
>> for other users... Next time...
>>
>> Sun put unix2dos in /bin in 4.1.1. This caused our source code control system
>> to break (someone had installed their own "special" unix2dos that our code
>> depending on. They should have changed the name. An easily fixed problem).
>>
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>> Brian
>>
>> --
>> brian@cimage.com
>>
>>
>> From: brian@cimage.com (Brian Kelley)
>> There were a couple of things you asked that I forgot to mention!
>>
>> Check with your vendors to make certain that the drivers you need to install
>> are going to work under 4.1.1. Generally, to be safe, I would reinstall
>> everything. This is a pain, I know. The only other way to be safe (that I
>> know of) is to keep copies of all the old kernel software (and the virgin
>> Sun software) and diff the old unmodified with the new unmodified, if they're
>> the same (you have to do this to each file...), you can reinstall your old
>> file. I think it would be more work than just reinstalling (and it would be
>> more prone to error). This is one of the reasons that vendors should have
>> install and uninstall scripts.
>>
>>
>>
>> Brian
>>
>> ---
>> brian@cimage.com
>>
>>
>> From: michael.harris@East.Sun.COM (Michael Harris - NYC SE)
>>
>> 4.1.1 is mostly a bug fix release (especialy the infamous PMEG
>> stuff). Other than that, it comes with Openwindows, Sun's
>> Open Look implementation with the combined X11R4 / NeWS server
>> on the tape.
>>
>> Beyond that, it has a lot of stuff in the GENERIC kernal which
>> was commented out in the 4.1 GENERIC kernel by default - TMPFS,
>> RFS, TFS etc. The kernel isn't way bigger (more like 100k big-
>> ger) its just got stuff that not everybody wants right now.
>>
>> So the crux of my reply is do it at your convenience. Only the
>> sparcstations will see a real performance improvement, but if
>> you've got about sixteen MB per they're probably humming along
>> OK.
>>
>> Sorry for such a subjective answer, but I've just upgraded my
>> SS1 to 4.1.1 from 4.1. You will notice lots of new things going
>> from 4.0.x to 4.1.x however (TLI, STREAMS etc.), but its still
>> an at your convenience sort of thing.
>>
>> HTH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:00 CDT