[OmniOS-discuss] theoretical question: oi151a9->omni151014

[PÁSZTOR György]

Hi,

It is a theoretical question, what I will write, but I would like to know
answers and thoughts about it, since I will try that in practice soon:

I have an OpenIndiana 151a9 on my home nas.
Most of the services are run from zones.
There are only one (or few) thing(s), which run from the GZ: nis-master,
and nfs/samba shares. (Sharings are handled through the appropriate zfs
attributes, there is nothing extra around that.)
There is a (nis-)slave is in one of the zones.

Most of the zones are "typical" (if that word exists at all in this
context :D) openindiana zones too with the same 151a9 version.
Exceptions:
One of the zones run virtualbox VMs. (Currently only one, but previously, I
had two, and later, maybe I will use more then that.)
One of the zones run omnios:
pasztor at omni:~$ pkg info entire |grep FMRI
          FMRI: pkg://omnios/entire@11-0.151014:20150402T192159Z
In one of the zones, I run a pkgrepo, I tried to build packages based on
sfe specfiles, which was not exactly there, when I started to use my nas.
eg. smartmontools. Then I added this repo to my gz.

One extra thing about this home-nas: the rpool is on a 64G pendrive now.
The zones, and my important data is on the spinning disks. (The name of
that pool is tank. :D)

I would like to use OmniOS on the host system instead. I had many reasons
for why I would like that.

In theory I have two idea how to implement this "upgrade":

Idea #1:
* stop all the zones.
* export zone configurations, and save them onto a dataset on tank
* Make snapshot about all the important zfs datasets in rpool,
* then make a backup copy to tank using send&receive.
* Plug out the pendrive
* Plug in an empty new pendrive, and install omnios onto it
* import zone configurations
* attach the zones
* start the zones
* fix non-working things, eg.: recreate or reorganize my nis service
* be happy!

If something fails, I have a fallback: plug back the original pendrive

Idea #2:
* plug in the new & empty pendrive into the system
* follow this guide to mirror the rpool:
  http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/2.1+Post-installation
* test the system if one of the pendrives is enough
* plug out one of the pendrives, and consider it as a fallback
* try some magic with pkg publishers /* magic happens here !!! */
* try to upgrade entire to omnios's 151014 /* and here :D */
* handle / fix the unexpected gotchas /* maybe here too :) */
* be happy!

If something fails, I can have two fallback:
* the pendrive, which I removed
* the previous BE, which contains my last working OI system :)


If I am honest, then I like idea#2 much more. It may contain adventures,
but would be a really nice way if it'd work.
It was also an adventure, when oracle stoped opensolaris, or at least
things around that. But we wanted to upgrade our production storage server
at my previous workplace from build143 to openindiana 151a, and we had to
manually handle some package dependencies, etc. and that was not even well
tested or well documented on openindiana's wiki to, how to do that, but at
least, it was a good starting point.
I think, this situation is a bit similar to that old story :)

Does sy. has some good advice, best practice, mathematical proof about that
it will never ever work, etc?

One though that come into my mind:
Try the whole situation (idea#2) first in a virtualbox machine, to see at
least if this kind of upgrade could work. Not with this kind of complexity,
just a freshly installed oi151a8 upgrade to a9, than to omni151014.
(I have not done this yet, but I think, this will be the 0th step.)
Did anybody tried this ever?

Kind regards,
Gyu