c0t0d0s0.org

It´s only a thought game and this blog entry is more a note to myself. I know we have the binary compatibility guarantee, but i know customers, who would like to take their complete Sol8 environment onto new machines. They don´t want to requalify the perl binaries and they don´t want to change the configuration or startup scripts. Now Sol 8 doesn´t run the newest machine. i thought a little bit about this problem. Between two coffees i drafted an idea:

Host A is a Solaris 8 system with an old application. Host B is a ultranew Sol 10 system. Same architecture.
Step 1: Checking the application binary with ldd on host A, which libaries will be loaded by the application.
Step 2: Snoop with truss on host A which files were accessed and which binaries where forked while running the application
Step 3: Stripe the leading slash, and copy all files found in step 1 and 2 from Host A to Host B relative to a directory (eg /lib/libm.so.2 will be copied to /export/app/foobar/lib/libm.so.2
Step 4: Run the Application in a chroot jail like chroot /export/app/foobar solaris8application

Is this feasible? Did i forgot something? i think i have something to try out between christmas and new years eve ...

Detlef Drewanz, a colleague from me, found an interesting way to migrate his filesystems from UFS to ZFS: The good old combination of ufsdump and ufsrestore. You have to be careful with ACL (seems to be fixes in Build 41) in your source filesystem but besides this this is an good way to do the migration.