Thursday, October 23, 2008

Removing Local Zone File Systems On Solaris 10 Unix

Hey There,

Today's post is a follow-up to our very recent posts on modifying existing local zone filesystems and creating new file systems in a local zone on Solaris 10. Today, we're moving to completion with this simple how-to on removing filesystems on local zones. We'll follow up with another simple post on how to create and destroy (all in one) local zones on Solaris 10. Even though I can write 500 hundred words on why I can't write less than 500 words, that post should be short ;) It almost "has" to be!

NOTE: This note is the same as in the last two posts. Nothing has changed ;) For those of you who haven't read those (or find this post all on its lonesome ;) here it is: When removing existing filesystems on a Solaris 10 local zone, all changes must be made to the filesystem from the global zone (assuming that you originally mounted it from there)!

1. First things first; you can't unmount a filesystem from within a local zone if it was created in the global zone. As per our notation in the post on creating filesystems on local zones, this does not apply to NFS, NAS or any other remote-or-network-mounted filesystems. These are mounted directly from the local zone and, as such, can be unmounted directly from the local zone.

One interesting thing, if you have your filesystem set up under the local zone's root, is that it won't show up on the global zone's "df -k" or "df -h," etc output. If you want to see the mount from the global zone (assuming you forgot where you put it or you just want to make sure), you can find out what filesystems are mounted in your local zone, from the global zone, (at least, this is one way) by running:

host # zoneadm list -vc <-- To list out the zones on your system from the global zone (DING is our example zone).
host # zonecfg -z DING info <-- This will list out more information than you need. Basically, look for the line at the top titled "zonepath:" You can then look under that zone path to see your local zone's root filesystem mounts. Note that you could just use "grep" to find all the lines in /etc/vfstab that include your local zone's name.

2. Back to cold harsh (but mercifully swift ;) reality. From the global zone, simply unmount your local zone filesystem, like so:

host # umount /zones/DING/root/DONG

3. Then, all that's left to do is to remove the local zone from the overall zone configuration (we're assuming that you've unmounted all of "your" local zone's filesystems before continuing and executing the steps here :) Again, this can all be done very simply by using the zonecfg command:

zonecfg –z DING
zonecfg:DING> remove fs dir=/DONG
zonecfg:DING:fs> commit
zonecfg:DING:fs> quit


4. Okay; step 3 included a white lie ;) If you don't want to get error messages or, worse, cause your system not to boot properly, it's recommended that you remove the local zone filesystem entries from /etc/vfstab in the global zone, as well.

And now (I kind of promise ;) you should be all set :) We'll post that creation/destruction post very soon, if not tomorrow. After that, we'll get back to Linux, AIX or any Operation System other than Solaris 10. We try to keep a fair spread given the sheer amount of distro's the term "Linux and Unix" actually encompasses. On the bright side, this blog's subject matter could easily be much more vague ;)

Cheers,

, Mike




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