Sun Aug 5 15:34:08 EDT 2007

The upgrade to Solaris 10 did not work. The main problem was that logging in at the console (even as root!) simply would not work: I'd get logged right back out again each time, with no error message or anything. WTF?

I managed to go into single-user mode, provide the root password (see? they do trust me) and get access that way. But I still couldn't figure out what was going wrong. Eventually I came across this entry in the logs

svc.startd[7]: [ID 694882 daemon.notice] instance svc:/system/console-login:default exited with status 16

And /var/svc/log/system-console-login:default.log said:

[ Aug  4 14:23:48 Executing start method ("/lib/svc/method/console-login") ]
[ Aug  4 14:24:05 Stopping because all processes in service exited. ]

Eventually I had to give up and revert back to Solaris 9. That part worked well, at least.

I've no idea what went wrong at this point, but since I haven't come across this before with other Solaris 10 installs I'm starting to wonder if it's a product of luupgrade attemting to merge the machine's current settings with Sol10. Between that suspicion and the increase in disk space needed to run luupgrade (not sure why, but for example /usr needed a couple extra GB of space in order to complete luupgrade; I presume something's being added or kept around, but there's no explanation I can find for this), I'm starting to think that just going with a clean install of Sol10 is the way to go.

Arghh. Live Upgrade was supposed to just work…

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Comment from "Jeroen Hartgers"
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 13:15:22 +0200

Hi,

I had exactly the same problem with the same error messages on my system when I upgraded a system from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10. What I ended up doing is replacing the /etc/pam.conf in the faulty system with a good /etc/pam.conf from a freshly installed Solaris 10 system. After a reboot, everything was fine.

Comment from Saint Aardvark the Carpeted
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 13:11:06 -0700

Dude! Thanks for that. I did think of doing that at the time, but I don't think I actually did it. It's going to be a while before I work on the machine again, but I'll give it a try and see how it goes.