Ultrix 2.3 vs. patches (or DECNET)

[Harvey R Moran]

Reply-to: moran at tron.UMD.EDU (Harvey R Moran)


In article <54084 at felix.UUCP> celozzi at CADILLAC.CAD.MCC.COM (Dominic Celozzi) writes:
>
>
>In response to problems found with Ultrix 2.3 - my God yes - DO NOT
>install Ultrix 2.3 if you are running DECnet.  My home site,
>Westinghouse Electronic Systems Group in Baltimore had made the
>mistake of attepting to install Ultrix 2.3.  What a nightmare.  As
   ...
>of a system.  (Flame Off)  The system became so corrupted by the end
>of the pathing and removing of patches that I beleive the system
>administrator was forced to completely reinstall Ultrix 2.2!  
>

Not quite.  Ultrix Support gave me a procedure using /etc/setld to
remove the 2.3 set and re-install the 2.2 set.  I removed the 2.3
and when trying to put back the 2.2, setld told me it was already there.
So I rebooted  and things *appeared* to work.  Wrong!  Among other things,
/usr/lib/sendmail was a zero length file.

What I ended up doing, at the suggestion of Ultrix Support, was using
the standalone system (a.k.a.  miniroot) to "restore" the dump level 0
made just before the install of 2.3.  In doing this, I got file system
full messages as soon as restore tried to read the symbol table.  I
stumbled around for a while and then mounted a "spare" disk file
system on /tmp of the miniroot.  I had to play "musical /etc/mount's"
to restore all the file systems.  Is this a well known technique?  It
is not in the manual and at least two people at Ultrix Support did not
suggest it when the "file system full" problem was presented to them.
I thought of it while taking a break to sweep my hair off the floor.

At any rate, you can bet tron will *not* be among the first sites to
install *any* new release of Ultrix.  I'll leave that to you more
adventurous sys-admins, and get around to it when the dust appears to
have settled.

Harvey Moran    (301) 765-2108 or (301) 993-7860  ...!uunet!umbc3!tron!moran