May 7, 2001 M. K. Brewer Sun Host OS Upgrade & Administration ==================================== We ran successfully for two weeks off the SCSI drive that Gary Wallace provided. The OS in the SCSI was a bit too messy for me though. It seemed to be an upgrade of a complete distribution of Solaris 7 containing a lot of unnecessary and obsolete stuff. It also used over 3Gb of disk space. Back in February, with Gary's help, I had done a clean install of Solaris 8 on Angela's machine. We installed only those components that were necessary or might be helpful in the future. Gary then installed all of the necessary additional software for development and use of the OT. I, therefore, decided to install this OS on the IOTA Sun. I made a complete backup of Angela's OS to tape, repartitioned and formatted the IOTA Sun's hard drive, and installed the tape backup of Angela's OS. There was one issue, however. Since Angela's machine is an Ultra 5 instead of an Ultra 10, it used a different graphics adapter and the new OS couldn't find the drivers for the Ultra 10 graphics adapter. I booted from the Solaris 8 CD-ROM's that we just purchased to install the correct graphics drivers. Since this was a newer version of Solaris 8 than the one on Angela's machine, it also offered to upgrade the OS. I accepted and it removed a bunch of patches, installed a new kernel and updated a lot of other stuff. I then installed the IDL server and Version 946 of the Bit3 PCI to VME bus adapter drivers. I brought up the OS and everything ran just fine. I made a tape backup of the new OS. Next, I backed up the /home partition of the SCSI drive containing all of our software, and copied it to the hard drive. The OT task came up and ran OK. After a bit of messing around (the *.d files in the /home/iota/iotamc_1.1/lmt/mc/depends directory needed rebuilding) we were able to successfully recompile the OT task also. Where we go from here: --------------------- Gary pointed out that there were new patches available for Solaris 8 at: http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=patches/patch-access Since the new OS was dated April 1, 2001 and I was running short on time, I elected to not install these. The above site should be looked at from time to time and new recommended patches should be applied. Especially those regarding security fixes. I made a new directory /usr/local/packages. When non-OS software is added or updated on the root partition, the distribution (usually a .tar.gz file) should be stored in appropriate subdirectories of /usr/local/packages. This will help if we need to re-install these packages or also install them on other machines (Angela's for instance). When new patches are applied, new users added, or new system software is added to the root partition, a new tape backup of the root partition should be made. Regular tape backups of the /home partition should also be made. If tape backups are kept current, we will be able to recover from any future problems quickly. It only takes about an hour to restore the OS from tape. As we found out, It takes days to rebuild it from scratch. Status of New OT ================ We exercised the new version of the OT quite a bit. It seems much more stable than before but still needs some work. I would suggest fewer, more informative, monitoring windows. As written, it is very easy to get the main window so cluttered with sub-windows that it is difficult to find the one you want quickly. Perhaps something like the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen would be helpful here. Whatever it is, it needs to be always visible. A default OT script would be nice. We could set this up for the IOTA telescope and have it always load on startup. Error handling still has a long way to go.