Sun irritates me at times

Tasked with upgrading another sysadmin's app and Oracle boxes (app on a 15K domain and database on a v880) on short notice. Thus had no time for proper research.

Due to my unfamiliarity to the other sysadmin's system, I chose to do a upgrade instead of installing from a flar. This added significantly to my pucker factor, as upgrades have a reputation (undeserved with current versions?) for being problematic. Further, /opt was not on the bootdg and had to be moved.

Well, Veritas' upgrade_start went without a hitch. I then upgraded the OSs (off CD on v880 and jumpstart on 15K). I then ran Veritas' upgrade_finish and upon reboot the fun began.

The box failed into maint mode as it couldn't stat what vfstab indicated were the root partitions. I was able to look at vfstab read-only and see that Veritas' script incorrectly modified my vfstab.

Joy.

I booted off of CD and was able to correct my vfstab. On reboot I was able to get to run level 3, but my Oracle and app partitions were unmountable. So after spending a few hours with a competent Brit Veritas tech, we found the following problems:

1) Sun 9's upgrade install (I was going from 8 to 9) blew away my sd.conf. This allowed me to only stat seven of my disks. I had saved off the sd.conf before starting on the advice of a co-worker. The funny thing is that I ribbed him for being overly paranoid. If I hadn't had the file on hand, I would have had to restore from NetBackup.

2) Veritas' vxfs Sun 8 binaries are incompatible with Sun 9. So, I had to pkgrm VRTSvxfs and then pkgadd VRTSvxfs in order to make it happy.

Note: none of the above was even hinted at in either Sun's or Veritas' documentation. Even the Veritas tech indicated that the script was known to be buggy (!!!).

HP-UX is SOOOOOO much better. Jumpstart is a pathetic, broken thing when compared to HP's Ignite. Further, I'd have no need for Veritas if I was using HP-UX.

And yet Sun is all over the place and HP keeps loosing market share.

????