On upgrading to SunOS 4.0.3

[Evan Moore]

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 at cc.williams.edu