Activating a boot environment

In a system with multiple BEs, situations might arise when it becomes necessary to activate a BE to test a patch or a new package without running the risk of losing the production environment. Therefore, a new BE will have to be created, changed, and finally, tested. However, it will have to be activated first. So, in all cases, the following recipes will be suitable.

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, it's necessary that we have a machine (physical or virtual) running Oracle Solaris 11; we log in to the system as the root user and open a terminal. Some extra disk space might be necessary.

How to do it…

First, let's activate the recently created BE:

root@solaris11:~# beadm activate solaris_test_1
root@solaris11:~# beadm list
BE               Active Mountpoint Space  Policy Created          
--               ------ ---------- -----  ------ -------          
solaris          N      /          37.96M static 2013-10-05 20:44 
solaris-backup-1 -      -          303.0K static 2013-10-26 22:49 
solaris-backup-a -      -          7.26G  static 2013-10-10 19:57 
solaris_test_1   R      -          26.06G static 2013-11-05 22:38 

Now, let's reboot it:

root@solaris11:~# init 6

After rebooting, let's test the existing unrar package and command:

root@solaris11:~# beadm list
BE             Active Mountpoint Space  Policy Created          
--             ------ ---------- -----  ------ -------          
solaris        -      -          8.57M  static 2013-10-05 20:44 
solaris-backup-1 -      -          303.0K static 2013-10-26 22:49 
solaris-backup-a -      -          7.26G  static 2013-10-10 19:57 
solaris_test_1   NR      -          26.06G static 2013-11-05 22:38 

root@solaris11:~# pkg info unrar
          Name: archiver/unrar
       Summary: Rar archives extractor utility
      Category: Applications/System Utilities
         State: Installed
     Publisher: solaris
       Version: 4.1.4
 Build Release: 5.11
        Branch: 0.175.1.0.0.24.0
Packaging Date: September  4, 2012 05:05:49 PM 
          Size: 391.47 kB
          FMRI: pkg://solaris/archiver/unrar@4.1.4,5.11-0.175.1.0.0.24.0:20120904T170549Z

Now, let's test our procedure by executing the following command:

root@solaris11:~# unrar
UNRAR 4.10 freeware      Copyright (c) 1993-2012 Alexander Roshal

Usage:     unrar <command> -<switch 1> -<switch N> <archive> <files...>
               <@listfiles...> <path_to_extract\>

<Commands>
  e             Extract files to current directory
  l[t,b]        List archive [technical, bare]
  p             Print file to stdout
  t             Test archive files
  v[t,b]        Verbosely list archive [technical,bare]
  x             Extract files with full path

<Switches>
  -             Stop switches scanning
  @[+]          Disable [enable] file lists

Wonderful! The unrar package has appeared on the system in the way that we planned.

An overview of the recipe

The act of activating and rebooting a BE are the final steps to be completed before we start using the BE. Likely, it's during this stage that we can test an installation package, an installation patch, or even an Oracle Solaris 11 upgrade without worrying about losing the whole system.