After installing 137137-09 patch OK in global zone, bad in non global zone

Question

Hi all,
scratching my head with this one.
Installed 137137-09 fine on Sun Fire V210. Machine has one non global zone running a proxy server (nothing very exciting there!). non global zone has a local filesystem attached, but don't think this is the issue (on my test V210 I created the same sort of filesystem and was unable to replicate the problem :( ).
So 137137-09 is fine in the global zone (I had the non global zone halted when patch installed) it is also installed in the non global zone (ie, when zone boots it says it's at rev 137137-09 via uname) in the patch log in the non global zone I get this:
PKG=SUNWust2.v
Original package not installed.
pkgadd: ERROR: ERROR: unable to get zone brand: zonecfg_get_brand: No such zone configured
This appears to be an attempt to install the same architecture and
version of a package which is already installed. This installation
will attempt to overwrite this package.
/usr/local/zones/cotchin/lu/dev/.SUNW_patches_1000109009-1847556-000000d3e42faa84/137137-09/FJSVcpcu/install/checkinstall: /usr/local/zones/cotchin/lu/dev/.SUNW_patches_1000109009-1847556-000000d3e42faa84/137137-09/FJSVcpcu/install/checkinstall: cannot open
pkgadd: ERROR: checkinstall script did not complete successfully
Dryrun complete.
No changes were made to the system.
I'm not sure if the branding error is causing the checkinstall postpatch script error or if they are not related. There doesn't seem to be any obvious permissions problems that I can find. I have checked that all the pkg and patch patches are up to date on the system. Searching on the brand error gives me a link to a problem with 127127-11, but that was installed on the system before the local zone was created and all the other seemingly appropriate patches (eg: 119254) are all up to date or at a higher revision than recommended.
I see the same problem on a M5000 which has two non global zones on it.
Both machines had the Solaris 10 50/08 update bundle applied when it came out,a nd have had recommended patch sets applied at regular intervals since.
This issue only came to light when trying the latest bundles with 138888-01/02 in it, and those fail to install on the global zones because the non global zone install dies claiming 137137-09 is not installed (which is plainly wrong).
I've tried to recreate this on a test server but unfortunately everything works as it should, even though the test server has a similar history in terms of patches and original setup to the others.
I'm planning to try to detatch the non global zone and try an attach -u to see if it will update the patches properly, but I'm not holding out much hope on that one (I need to wait for a mainteiance window when I can take the zone down in a couple of days).
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Well, I am following up to my own post it seems I have determined what is causing the problem, or at least situations where the problem can be reproduced which I have been able to do on my test system.
It seems that if the zone container's zonepath is in /usr (eg: /usr/zones, /usr/local/zones, or some other path under /usr) the patchadd of 137137-09 will fail with the log similar to posted above, and this will stop further kernel patches (eg: 138888-02) being added.
The test system had everything patched to current and searching the web I can't find any other instances of this being an issue, but I have reproduced this problem on my test machine (which worked OK because it's test zones were in a filesystem mounted as /zones). When I used zoneadd -z <zonename> move to a zone in /usr/local and applied 137137-09 the same problem came up.
Not sure what is causing this issue.. I imagine it might have to do with some sort of confusion with the patch utilities and the read-only loopback filesystems in the sparse root zone but I can't bs sure.
Maybe someone at sun will see this and figure out what the deal is :)
When I moved my test zone back to /zones the patch applied perfectly so it's definitely having it in /usr or /usr/local (I tried both locations, even though they are seperate ufs filesystems on my test server).
Oh I am running DiskSuite to mirror filesystems on my V210's which may or may not have anything to do with it.
Hope this helps someone in the future at least!