Very nice feature of solaris is to use a zfs snapshots to protect the current state/configuration of a machine.
And it is very easy to use, all we have to do is:
> beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created -- ------ ---------- ----- ------ ------- solaris NR / 11.23G static 2013-07-04 16:45 solaris-backup-1 - - 155.0K static 2013-07-04 17:28
After the installation of solaris a snapshot was already created automatically.
After installation and configuration of various software we can create a new snapshot:
beadm create -e solaris solaris-backup-2
If something bad will happen afterwards we can just simple select the backup at the boot manager! and then activate our backup as the active snapshot:
beadm activate solaris-backup-2
I think the old/bad snapshot/base can be deleted afterwards, but i didn’t yet tried that, maybe it is a good idea to create a base snapshot and working snapshot, and set the working snapshot as the active one, so in the case of an error we can create a new snapshot based on the base snapshot, and afterwards we can remove the bad working snapshot.
Solaris is very smart 🙂