Within Reason: Throwing Sun's Patch Management Tools Away

Throwing Sun's Patch Management Tools Away

Ceri Davies — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:46:00 +0000

Patching Solaris is difficult

Patching Solaris is historically hard work involving cross referencing the installed patches (showrev -p) with the installed release (cat /etc/release) and the latest Recommended patch cluster and patch report at SunSolve.

Sun tools actually make it harder

Since this is such a nightmare, Sun have offered a huge number of methods for patching Solaris systems. Some are no longer properly maintained or don’t support recent releases, some are heavy X based monsters, some have a huge dependency list (33 packages for smpatch in Solaris 10 6/06, and that’s not only the ‘light’ version, but is also incomplete). The one thing they have in common is that they suck.

smpatch is the worst of the lot

After a recent experience where smpatch not only rendered a production machine unbootable, but required three reboots to do so and then had failed to even offer all of the available patches, I’ve had enough.

From now on we’ll be using Patch Check Advanced (PCA) from http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/.

"Throwing Sun's Patch Management Tools Away" by Pawel

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:36:46 +0000

Swell tool! Just tried it on a 5.9 scrap system that had been up for 1061 days, 421 patches downloaded and installed. Thanks for the hint! Btw, do you know of a way to clean up the backout backups after everything is determined to be fine and dandy ?

"Throwing Sun's Patch Management Tools Away" by Ceri

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:36:46 +0000

To be honest, I don't usually clean up the backout backups; it's not something I've really had to worry about. You should be able to just go through and get rid of the save/ directories though.