SYSV Packages fundamentals

If you are new to Solaris or never bothered looking at how the SYSV packages are built up, i found a good article at bigadmin that could be worth a read:

Introduction to Package Components for the Solaris OS

I found this article while researching why a file was not updated when patching and upgrading a system. It turned out that the file is flagged as a editable file, which means it will not be overwritten by the package system. Such files should be handled by a class action script that are responsible for making the required changes to the file.

In this particular case we had problems with OPL servers (M5000,M8000) that did not have a working console login. We had installed them with a flash archive created with a Solaris release predating OPL support, so the /etc/ou.ap used by autopush was not updated with information required for OPL hardware.