When I upgrade, should I use SunInstall “upgrade”, or start over?
You can’t do a SunInstall “upgrade” from 4.1.x to Solaris2. You can use the Admigration toolkit (q.v.) to help you move from SunOS 4.1.x (Solaris 1, actually) to Solaris 2. If you’re moving from Solaris 2.1 to 2.2, or 2.2 to 2.3, …, then you can use “upgrade” to preserve your existing partitions and local changes (including pkgadd!!), though it runs very slowly (about 1.5-2x the time for a reinstall) and does require that you have enough free space in / and /usr – make these big when you first install! If you run out of space in one of your partitions, you can always remove some components. Those will not be upgraded and can be installed elsewhere after initial upgrade (e.g., you can remove OW, Xil, Dxlib, manual pages, etc) There is no need to backout patches before upgrading. In 2.2, the system would back them out for you, in 2.3 it won’t back out the patches but removes them without a trace. The upgrade doesn’t work as well as a full install. E.g., the upgrade from 2.x (x<3) to 2.
