OpenSolaris – What do you do when your image-update doesn’t work?

I’ve been a long time user of/tinkerer with OpenSolaris on my desktop (for the obvious reasons: Time Slider, ZFS, DTrace, etc). I am going to start posting tips & tricks. To start off, here is one way I have found to “fix” a “pkg image-update” failure. All it does is create a new boot environment and install to it, which can solve a lot of the problems that might occur when running on the pkg.opensolaris.org/dev repository when you update:

beadm create osol-snv_1XX
mkdir /mnt/osol-snv_1XX
beadm mount osol-snv_1XX /mnt/osol-snv_1XX
pkg -R osol-snv_1XX install SUNWipkg
pkg -R osol-snv_1XX image-update
bootadm update-archive -R /mnt/osol-snv_1XX
beadm activate osol-snv_1XX

Notes:

  1. osol-snv_1XX is simply the name you give the new boot environment. XX being the snv version (currently 133).
  2. beadm is the command for working with boot environments in zfs. Create makes a snapshot, mount mounts it to a particular directory, and activate makes it the default on the next reboot.
  3. pkg -R does the update on the alternate boot env.
  4. bootadm adds the boot environment to grub (update the archive using that directory as the root is what we are telling it to do here, just like the pkg -R cmd).

If someone visiting this blog has alternate methods, I’d be interested in knowing about it.

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