Install Solaris 10 get 8

Today at work me and a co-worker were flaring a Solaris 8 box, upgrading It to Solaris 10. We go about the install as normal, boot a Solaris 10 CD, install off our stock Solaris 10 Flar image, reboot, install standard corporate package scripts which install many things that are required by corporate policy including VxVM. These scripts are rather clever, they are fired off by a rcX.d script that is placed in the proper location. And they automatically reboot the box as necessary for each app, an hour or so after the flaring process has finished, and the box has rebooted 3 or 4 times because of software installation requirements, we finally get a chance to log in and see how it all worked.

Well to our surprise, upon logging uname reports Solaris 8, yes 8. Well after much pondering, and reflarring the system again to make sure there wasn’t a typo or something. We finally figure out what was happening. And I bet you will never guess what was happening.

Turns out that during the install process, Veritas was mirroring the root drives, and since the machine has Veritas on it before, Veritas was nice enough to mirror the Solaris 8 off the secondary root mirror, right on top of our brand new Solaris 10 install. It sure was helpful, now during this whole procedure Solaris never even logged a problem even though all of its files were being over written, and then the machine is rebooted with out a peep out of Solaris 10.

To avoid this from happening in the future we are going to wipe the partition table on both drives, and recreate them during the flaring process. We haven’t tested this yet, I had to leave before we could have the guy in the datacenter 1500 miles away insert the dvd back into the machine, but it should work.