do i have to get ahold of an exactly identical mobo, or will osol tolerate a mobo by a different manufacturer, but with the same chipset... or would it refuse to even boot? should i just bear the pain of buying an identical spare mobo, cpu, ram, psu, so that i'm ready should the worst happen?
The answer is, as usual, it depends. Even though OpenSolaris is generally pretty tolerant of hardware changes, it won't help _you_ if you happen to be an outlier. For an average user, I would say "don't do it", but it is nothing an experienced system administrator couldn't handle, IMO.
The question boils down to knowing what persistent information the OS stores about hardware, and whether it is capable of automatically detecting the change and regenerating that persistent information.
Swapping CPUs, RAM and power supplies should be painless, as long as they are compatible hardware-wise. Swapping disks is a well-documented procedure. Swapping the motherboard can potentially change the topology (and therefore the physical device tree), disk controllers and NICs, and might require booting off a LiveCD, mounting your root disk and doing minor surgery on some of the plain-text files.
Start with path_to_inst(4) and devfsadm(1M) man pages. Explore the relationship between /devices and /dev namespaces, and where /dev paths are stored persistently (e.g. vfstab). How disks are enumerated by BIOS and GRUB. Booting and mounting also differs between ZFS and UFS. See how device instance numbers are used in network link naming, and where those names are used persistently - unless you're using NWAM, manual reconfiguration may be required.
And the mantra that never gets out of fashion: back up your data :) -Artem _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
