91erm@bigbird.cc.williams.edu (Evan Moore) (08/04/89)
I took the plunge and upgraded to SunOS 4.0.3 this week, and thought I'd share the experience and one problem with everyone. I was coming from SunOS 4.0.1, so I was using the new sunupgrade scripts to do the work. They're pretty good, and the no-rewind tape operation is a win (not to anyone's surprise). I had no trouble except for the story below, and though I haven't had time this week to start tweaking, it looks good and solid. As part of the upgrade script, the script try's to mount your entire file tree. It attempts to be smart and first mount the root partition, interpret the /etc/fstab file, and then mount the other stuff. However, the code to read the fstab is not to swift. It'll do the job for simple cases, but it does not know about anything other than normal and NFS mounts -- ignore and swap listing will confuse it and you'll probably get a message that it can't mount something before it aborts. I had this case, with several ignore entries floating around in the file. Also, the mount command used is not quite the same (I don't think) as the normal one. These two limits forced me to use the following simple work-around. Do the mounts first. After loading the miniroot, mkdir /a and mount your root partition on it. Then mount all your other filesystems in the normal places. In effect, you want your entire file treee hanging below /a. After the mounts are made, run the sunupgrade script. It'll realize the mounts have been done and skip that step. Hope this helps someone. It only took me about 30 minutes to figure out what was going on once I had the time to look, but I could have used the 30 minutes for loading tapes or other nifty stuff. Evan R. Moore Academic Computing Group Williams College 91erm@cc.williams.edu