[csw-users] CSW on an Oracle ZFS Server (7320)

[Laurent Blume]

On 01/07/2013 22:36, Forrest Aldrich wrote:
> We purchased two Oracle ZFS 7320 servers recently.    To my surprise,
> these systems are designed to be closed and not meant for general
> shell-level interaction.   For example, / is mounted read-only -- but
> because it's a ZFS filesystem, that flag is easily overridden.
>
> I wanted to install some basic command-line utilities for use here.
> Turns out, Oracle doesn't include some basic /usr/bin commands like "vi"
> and "rsync".
>
> The solution, I thought, was to simply create multiple ZFS volumes to
> allow for:
>
> /opt/csw
> /etc/opt/csw
> /var/opt/csw
>
> turns out, it's not that easy as pkg installation needs to write and
> interact with /var/sadm (and other locations), which is making this
> impractical to accomplish.
<snip>

What I'd try if I couldn't pkgadd is create the datasets above, then 
install the packages on a staging box, and rsync those directories (for 
the initial rsync bit, doing it with tar).
It could come from a VBox used only for that and kept extra clean.
Honestly, that would probably be better than trying to build locally 
(you'll probably miss headers and stuff anyway).

Laurent