Solaris pkg upgrade fails with “maximum number of instances of the package which may be supported at one time on the same system has already been met” message

This message is pretty awesome, isn’t it? You can get this message when trying to upgrade a package. At least that’s what happened to me.

username# pkgadd -d .

The following packages are available:

  1  pkgname          pkgname

                          (sparc) version.sol5.sparc

Select package(s) you wish to process (or 'all' to process all packages). (default: all) [?,??,q]: 1

Processing package instance <pkgname> from </tmp/ven/solaris>

pkgname(sparc) version.sol5.sparc Illumio

Current administration requires that a unique instance of the <pkgname> package be created.  However, the maximum number of instances of the package which may be supported at one time on the same system has already been met.

 No changes were made to the system.

This issue is pretty easy to get around. You just need point your admin file that has the right options. In my case, my admin file needed the instance=overwrite:

mail=
instance=overwrite
partial=ask
runlevel=ask
Require that our dependencies are met when installing.
idepend=quit
However, if someone tries to uninstall us but another package depends on us,
we should just warn them & ask if they want to proceed anyway.
rdepend=ask
space=ask
setuid=ask
conflict=ask
action=nocheck
networktimeout=60
networkretries=3
authentication=quit
keystore=/var/sadm/security
proxy=
basedir=default

If you’re using instance=ask, it works also. It’ll just ask you before overwriting.

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