What is Image the Packaging System?
• The Image Packaging System (IPS) is a new network-centric software packaging and delivery system in Oracle Solaris 11. IPS allows efficient, observable, and controllable transitions between known configurations of software content providing administrators with safe system upgrade environments and better control over planned system downtime schedules.
• The ZFS file system is integral to IPS, providing administrators the ability to perform updates on a file system clones on live production systems.
• NOTE: While many IPS commands that query the system (list,info,contents,search,history) can be performed by any user, commands that make changes to the system image must be performed by adopting an appropriate administrative role.

We recommend that those that are using Solaris 11 construct their own local IPS package repository.

Required tasks:
1.Creating a ZFS file system to hold the repository
2.Obtaining software packages from the Oracle Solaris download site
3.Making the contents of the repository available
4.Configuring the repository server service
5.Starting the repository service
6.Setting the local IPS publisher
7.Testing IPS on the local server

Create a ZFS file system for the local package repository in the root pool.
# zfs create rpool/export/IPS

Obtain IPS software packages from the Oracle Solaris download site.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html

Uncompress and concatenate the files.
# unzip sol-11_1-repo-full.iso-a.zip
# unzip sol-11_1-repo-full.iso-b.zip
# cat sol-11_1-repo-full.iso-a sol-11_1-repo-full.iso-b > sol-11_1-repo-full.iso

Make the contents of the repository .iso file available to the depot server
# lofiadm -a sol-11_1-repo-full.iso
# mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
# rsync -aP /mnt/repo /export/IPS

Use SMF to make the repository server service available
# svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/inst_root=/export/IPS/repo
# svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/readonly=true
# svcprop -p pkg/inst_root application/pkg/server

Start the service
# svcadm refresh application/pkg/server

Refresh the package repository
# pkgrepo refresh -s /export/IPS/repo

Set the local IPS Publisher.
The default origin for the solaris publisher is http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release
We need to change that on the clients to allow them to access the packages from your local IPS repository.
# pkg set -G ‘*’ -g http://your.server.com/ solaris
The -G removes the previous publisher and the -g adds yours

Test access to your local server
# pkg search entire
You can also access your local IPS server via a browser pointing it to the URI of your server.