Re: Solaris 10 patching

John Oliver wrote:
The quick question: How do I keep Solaris 10 systems patched?

I know about the patch clusters. The first time I installed Solaris in
recent memory (x86), we had a cluster on some share, and I was told to
just run it over and over again until all the patches were applied.
When I look on SunSolve, I see that there are "Patch Bundle Chunks".
Not sure what to do with that.

Googling around led me to smpatch, which sounded great. It took quite a
bit of beating the bushes to discover which package I needed to install
to get smpatch ( SUNWpprou for anyone else who's looking for that). But
trying to install quickly leads me into a maze of dependencies. I do
not want to install a gazillion X related packages on a machine used as
a server.

So... what is the easiest way to patch a Solaris 10 system, and then,
over time, to keep it properly updated?


The easiest and, perhaps, the ONLY way to do it successfully is "Patch Check Advanced or "PCA" which was written by a man named, if memory serves me, Martin Paul. PCA will determine which patches you have installed, which patches you need, and then do the right thing!

From what I've read here, Sun's patching process is badly broken and there is little chance that it will be fixed any time soon. Martin has a product that is clearly superior and free. Sun can't hope to compete.

The other obstacle is that Sun seems to have a great deal of trouble merely publishing the patches and keeping the "master patch list" (it's not called that but I can't recall the correct nomenclature) syntactically correct and up to date!

My advice would be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". If you have a problem that is fixed by a patch, install that patch and any prerequisites.
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