In this HowTo I will do my best to introduce you to the Solaris Live Upgrade process. Recently, I have had to do this quite a bit and I figured why not and just write up a quick HowTo on this subject. As a few of you already know I am not a fan of OpenSolaris, though as of recent I am starting to get drawn into it.

One thing about the Live Upgrade process is that it allows you to have multiple BE's ( Bootable Environments ). This is so cool, since this allows you to have a CLEAN BE and the others to Test/Destroy/...Whatever. First things first you need to make sure that you have at least one available partition that is big enough to to transfer your current environment and enough space to do the Live Upgrade as well as have the OpenSolaris Express Image. OK, lets get into the Live Upgrade process....

The other day I was ripping at my hair because I could not figure out how to console into OpenSolaris on my X86 box at home. I had my serial connection connected correctly.... But, I just could not figure out what command to use to console into Solaris as I always used minicom for Linux.

After much searching I found the command tip, which is the Solaris command equivalent to Linux's minicom.  The command tip is actually quite easy to use, you just need to know some basics and modify your /etc/remote configuration file if you are running on a x86 system.

This script will find a MAC address on a Cisco IOS based switch.

Here's what you'll see when the switch is successful and unsuccessful finding the MAC address.

Notice it prompts you for your username and password. This script is integrated with the Expect Telnet script on this site.

kshort@LinuxStudent:~$ ./findMACaddress_final 10.10.12.1
Enter the MAC Address? 0013.72fb.3050
Username? kshort
Password?

-------------------Here Are the The Results of Your Search------------------

vlan   mac address     type    learn     age              ports
------+----------------+--------+-----+----------+--------------------------
Supervisor:
*   95  0013.72fb.3050   dynamic  Yes         65   Gi1/3