Martin Paul wrote:
Hi,
Ihsan Dogan wrote:
Is it possible to install only the missing patches on host a, which
are installed on host b?
A flash archive, as suggested by Michele, is definitely the best way
to go.
If that's not an option, you can get a list of all patches installed
on host b (in the correct order) with "ls -rt /var/sadm/patch/". You
could then feed this list into "pca -i" on host a. Never tried that in
a real-world scenario, though. E.g. some driver patches might not
apply to host a, if it isn't the same architecture as host b.
Just to reiterate Martin's point here, to use a flash archive (flar)
from one system and apply it to another both machines should be as
closely matched as possible.
They'll obviously need to have the same system architecture and ideally
should be the same model (i.e. from one SunFire T2000 to another SunFire
T2000), to ensure that the drivers from machine a will work on machine b.
I've used flars to clone test systems before and have to say that they
are extremely useful for scenarios that are suited to them.
You need to be careful using flars with systems that have certain
machine specific configurations. For example, suppose you have a machine
- machine1 - that is running a web server and the web server's
configuration file contains a reference to the hostname - say
machine1.mydomain.com. If you take a flar of that machine and apply it
to another similar system - machine2 - then the new system will have a
web server configuration file with a reference to machine1.mydomain.com...
Also, flars do not play well with zones, so if your machine is a Solaris
10 machine with zones, you may need to look for an alternative...
HTH,
-Don
Martin.
