Comments on: Easy Solaris patching with pca

By: Martin Paul

Martin Paul — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 07:33:50 +0000

@yuri: PCA still works fine. While it needs frequent updates due to Sun’s changes to the SunSolve infrastructure, I always managed to keep it working. As you might guess, I’m the author. If you have problems to get it going, feel free to contact me. See the PCA webpage for contact information.

@Mark: You can of course get all patches (not only the free ones) with PCA. You only have to connect your contract information to your Sun Online Account. Go to sunsolve.sun.com, login with your SOA, and add your contract number via the “Change Contract” link. You will now be able to access all contract information when browsing sunsolve, and PCA will be able to download all patches with this SOA. Feel free to contact me in case of problems.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:41:53 +0000

I agree that smpatch is troublesome (far more so that it ought to be), though I do not find it useless. When I register a server with sconadm, I specify not only a user/pass for a Sun Online Account, but also a Sun support contract number.

Without the Sun support contract, I would not get patches for all Sun packages, just patches that they consider “Security” and “Device Drivers”. See Sun’s explanation:
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/sunspectrum/resources.jsp#policy

Example: My server has SUNWbind installed from a Solaris 10 1/06 install DVD (BIND 9.2.4). The server was initially registered via sconadm without a Sun support contract number, and smpatch did not give me any patches for SUNWbind. Later, I registered the server with a Sun support contract number, and smpatch patched the app to current 9.3.4-P1.

My concern: PCA has no way to use a Sun support contract number (please correct me if I’m wrong). I need more than just Sun’s ‘free’ patches, I need them all. Can pca give me that?

By: Nickus

Nickus — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 07:51:26 +0000

I just looked at sunsolve and the patchdiag.xref file is still there. The timestamp was 14th of September so it looks like they are still updating. However, sunsolve was it usual slow self and I got an error trying to download it the first time. Sun really really needs to get their act together with sunsolve.

By: yuri

yuri — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:55:20 +0000

PCA does not work last two month following patchdiag missing on sunsolve.sun.com.

By: Nickus

Nickus — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:48:16 +0000

It was a real eye opener for me when I found it about a year ago. Before that I had been struggling with smpatch that simply could hang while running “smpatch analyze”. pca is probably 100x faster than smpatch on certain operations.

More admins need to be aware of it yes, but maybe Sun should include it in the base install. That would be a big improvement.

By: Shane Falco

Shane Falco — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:06:23 +0000

Yes, PCA is great! It definitely fills the critical Solaris patching void for older systems as well as the new, since smpatch is absolutely worthless.

It’s always good to see PCA getting a mention…more admins need to be aware of it.