My opensolaris storage server had been acting pretty flaky as of late. It would reboot when it got any heavy use, and wouldn't post and come back up. Now that's not exactly what you want out of any kind of computer, now is it?

My server is in an old RAID case (I found it in my old office having 4 9gig scsi drives in it). I gutted the thing and threw in a laptop drive for booting, an optical drive for fun, and a 5 bay hot-swap rack thing for 3.5" data drives. Then I bought a new power supply, and crammed a mini-itx mobo in there. It's not pretty but it works.

So I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the motherboard since it was a little pokey in any case. I decided on the Via VB8001. I had to upgrade my sata card too since the new motherboard supported PCIe. No worries there.

Turns out that 1) the Nano isn't well supported in opensolaris yet and 2) the network card needs third-party drivers. Thanks to the interwebs however I already knew that and knew it wasn't really a big deal.

Well, that was all well and good. But opensolaris 2008.11 seems a little old and I figured it might be time to upgrade. This time I figured I'd try the online upgrade rather than something more drastic like needing a physical DVD (how quaint!).

Good news: the online upgrade process works like a champ. All you have to do (after upgrading a few packages on 2008.11):

-bash-3.2$ pfexec pkg image-update -nv


Opensolaris will grab all the new code, and plot your installation strategy. If it looks good, just run it again without the "-nv" and it will create a new boot environment for you. Reboot into that, and you're done!

I did have one strange issue - my storage pool gave me a hair-raising ZFS-8000-72 error after I booted into the new BE but a zpool export and import handled that, well, handily.

It's really nice that this OS upgrade stuff is finally becoming so easy even on pre-release grade software.. ZFS really is magic!