Setting up a Solaris zone for Blastwave software

When I first installed Blastwave software on Solaris 10 or Solaris Express, I just installed it on the global zone. I soon realized that this decision would cause some problems. Blastwave packages were replicated in every Solaris zone I created and, letting aside the waste of disk space, the process of upgrading Blastwave's packages was painful because:

• it propagated changes to every non-global zone by default
• it complained about packages dependencies with messages such as:

# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -u
## Verifying package dependencies in zone
## Verifying package dependencies in zone

The package depends on package currently
being removed from zone .

The package depends on package currently
being removed from zone .

The package depends on package currently
being removed from zone .

The package depends on package currently
being removed from zone .

Dependency checking failed for package on zones
.

Do you want to continue with the removal of [y,n,?]

One solution to avoid propagating packages to non-global zones would be using the -G pkgadd flag, which Blastwave packages use indirectly, and this can be achieved by setting the ADMINFLAG variable:

export ADMINFLAG=' -G'

Thanks to some suggestion by the LQ guys, I also discovered that, to comply with Solaris/SVR4 standards, Blastwave CSW packages should (but don't) separate configuration files by providing the /var/opt/csw and /etc/opt/csw directories.

The solution I chose was creating a non-global zone to install Blastwave's software and loopback mount /opt/csw in the other zones. I then created a sparse zone and installed all the Blastwave's packages I needed there. The last thing I had to do was loopback mounting the non-global zone's /opt/csw directory into the global zone (to give desktop users access to the software) just adding this line in /etc/vfstab:

/export/home/zones/blastwave/root/opt/csw - /opt/csw lofs - yes

Blastwave's packages are now isolated in their zone and management is straightforward via Blastwave's pkg-get command.