Recently, I was asked to give some advice on an integration project involving some Solaris web servers . One of the sides requested to install the top command. Now I know and love top for Linux but using top on Solaris is a waste in my opinion. Solaris comes with the prstat command built in- why use something else? Of course he answered that top was standard for him and he was used to it but I felt obliged to convince him otherwise so I dug around and found some proof 🙂
The Solaris Flash installation feature enables you to use a single reference installation of the Solaris OS on a system, which is called the master system. Then, you can replicate that installation on a number of systems, which are called clone systems. You can replicate clone systems with a Solaris Flash initial installation that overwrites all files on the system or with a Solaris Flash update that only includes the differences between two system images. A differential update changes only the files that are specified and is restricted to systems that contain software consistent with the old master image.
I ran into several issues trying to create such a DVD when following the standard Google results so I thought I'd summarize my experiences. This is a work in progress- I might hit a brick wall at some point, but I hope not.
I googled for "Cloning Solaris Zones" and found lots of documentation on the zoneadm clone feature. I started to follow the howtos and hit a brick wall... my zoneadm doesn't know how to clone. Deeper digging shows that the documentation on Sun's site was for Solaris Express- Sun's bleeding edge version of OpenSolaris- Can I say "How useless!"