Hi; Thank you so much for this tool. It really is a tool - I background the patch process across hundreds of machines and it works fantastically.
Once again, thanks. Andrew Skinner Symcor Canada, 320 Front Street West, Toronto ON ( Office: 416-673-3821 Cell: 416-320-4121 * askin...@symcor.com From: Martin Paul <martin.p...@univie.ac.at> To: "PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion" <pca@lists.univie.ac.at> Cc: pca-n...@lists.univie.ac.at Date: 09/09/2013 07:13 AM Subject: [pca] PCA is 10! Sent by: pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at PCA is 10! Scrolling down on the PCA-News web page, at the very bottom, one finds this message: "2003/09/09: First version. Introducing PCA 1.0". So it's really 10 years now since I decided to make this script public, after I've been using it for some time internally. It had 208 lines at that time. Only one day later I received the first e-mail with the subject "pca" from Andrew Brooks, which was a lot like the many messages I received in the next ten years: First, he thanked for the useful script. Such comments from PCA users turned out to be my main motivation to maintain and refine PCA in the following years. So thanks to all of you who ever sent positive comments! Second, he provided an idea (and included code) for some new function (a new option -H to output HTML) which I immediately decided *not* to include in the official version of PCA :-) In my answer I stated that I wanted to keep PCA as simple as possible, not depending on some URLs staying consistent on Sun's web page. I always liked Unix for its tradition of simple commands which can be used in pipes to achieve great things. Soon other PCA users provided more and more input and I started to add new functions and options over the time, always weighing simplicity against usefulness. The option to download patches from Sun directly was probably one of the most useful, and the one which caused me most work in the last years. Sun (and later Oracle) turned the simple process of downloading a patch file via FTP into a complicated procedure with authentication, server redirects, dependencies on certain HTTP features etc. which I always had to follow closely to keep the download functions in PCA working. There were moments when I seriously thought about giving up on it. While I knew that Sun engineers were using PCA themselves, and Sun never succeeded in providing a own, working patch administration tool (I would have been the first to switch, believe me!) they never officially acknowledged PCA, although it was recommended on some Sun websites and PDFs. As I got a lot of e-mails in the meantime from admins asking about the usage of PCA and me answering the same questions over and over again, I created the PCA mailing lists (for those interested in numbers, I have 4827 messages in my folder with private PCA communication, and 3139 messages on the PCA mailing list - I definitely wrote more text than code). This helped a lot, as power users now answered the queries from beginners. I also had a lot more contact to the users of PCA and was fascinated in how many different ways and procedures it was being used. I also got in contact with Gerry Haskins and Don O'Malley from Sun, which made it a lot easier to sort out problems and to get information about the internals of Sun's patch creation and publication. Thanks to both of them for their help and patience! With the appearance of Solaris 11 and its IPS system, traffic on the mailing list was reduced a lot. As PCA is not needed anymore on Solaris 11, it is now being used mostly by experienced admins running Solaris 10 who already know what they do. Personally, I also think that PCA is feature complete for quite some time now, and as (now) Oracle doesn't change their patch infrastructure anymore, new versions of PCA have been reduced to a minimum. As far as I'm concerned, that's very welcome. While I still work with some Solaris systems, we're moving away from Solaris here slowly, due to the high prices of Oracle hardware and support. Of course I'll keep PCA working as long as somebody is still using it. Finally, let me state that I'm pretty proud of what PCA turned out over the years - it has saved numerous sysadmins around the world uncountable hours of work and frustration. This compensates for all the time I invested, even if it was frustrating now and then when performing complicated tests to ensure PCA's analysis being correct or hunting for obscure bugs. Would I publish PCA 1.0 once again if I could go back to 2003? I think so :-) If only for the amount of positive feedback I got over all the years. Let me end with a quotation which is the basis of my work on PCA (and also in general): "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
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