The Solaris 10 Recommended and Sun Alert patch clusters located on the SunSolve page have had some improvements made so that installation of the clusters is easier and more efficient. Recently released, these updates are available in the current clusters for contract customers from the Patch Cluster & Patch Bundle Downloads on SunSolve. Gerry Haskins' Patch Corner blog carries all the details including special thanks to Ed Clark who instituted these updates.

A brief rundown of some of the improvements:

• False negatives are filtered out from the patch utility return codes. If the cluster install script returns "1", now users can be sure that there is a real problem which needs investigating.

• New 'installcluster' script will exit as soon as it encounters an unexpected failure so as not to compound issues by trying to further apply patches

• Context intelligence is now part of the 'installcluster' script for patching operations. It informs users when zones need to be halted, and it provides phased installation to handle patches which absolutely require an immediate reboot before further patches can be applied.

• Better integration with Solaris Live Upgrade as the user can now specify the Live Upgrade alternate boot environment to patch by name.

• Space checking is performed prior to installation via the 'installcluster', which will halt if it believes there is insufficient space to complete the installation successfully.

• Messages and log files produced by the 'installcluster' script are now clear and well structured.

• 'patch_order' places patches in an optimal order for installation to avoid known issues. The 'installcluster' script will check for pre-requisite patches and halt installation if they are not present, advising the user of the 'installcluster' script option to use to install pre-requisite patches.

• Improvements to the back end processes provides higher and more consistent cluster quality since the clusters are now routed to Patch System Test (PST) prior to release. Once they have passed PST testing, they will then be available for download.

More Information

Improvements to Solaris 10 Recommended and Sun Alert Patch Clusters released - Haskins' blog entry

Patch Cluster & Patch Bundle Download Page on SunSolve

Analyzing a patchadd or patchrm Failure in the Solaris OS - BigAdmin Feature Article by Enda O'Connor

New PatchFinder Tool Offers Richer Search Experience

New Solaris 10 Patching Learning Opportunities by Sun Learning Services [...read more...]

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