Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
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) image/gif CONFIDENTIALITY WARNING This communication,
Re: [pca] Patch xxxxxx-xx is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone.
Recommend you attach with a -u (lowercase) unless you want to copy down all of /opt as well. -Drew. From: Harvey, Dominic dominic.har...@cgi.com To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion pca@lists.univie.ac.at Date: 06/18/2013 09:27 AM Subject:Re: [pca] Patch xx-xx is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Sent by:pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at Hi Neil, Thank you for the reply. I finally found the problem. My colleague had attached the local zone with -F flag which is to force the zoneadm attach without installing the patches into the local zone. As pca uses the showrev -p command to list the patches installed, he did not see that some patches have been install on the global zone and tries to install them again. We will reschedule the change with our client, to attach the zone with -U flag, and let you know the result. Merci et bonne journée Thank you and have a good day De : pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at [mailto:pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at ] De la part de Brookins, Neil (Philadelphia) Envoyé : 18 juin 2013 08:33 À : PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion Objet : Re: [pca] Patch xx-xx is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. I always patch my global zone first. Then I look on the non-global zones to see if any patches are still missing and usually they are not missing any. Occasionally I need to install one patch in the non-global zone due to an application that exists there which is not in the global zone, but that is not very often. So, with this procedure I do not run into the errors that you are seeing below. I?m confused by your list of patches below. Let me explain? You state that the zone already has 14-03 installed (This is seen on the line below that starts with ?Host: ??) According to the readme for 14-03 it requires that you have 147147-26 already installed. Yet, you are trying to install 147147-26? That doesn?t make sense since that patch is already installed. This line below shows that its not installed. That?s impossible since 14-03 is installed. 147147 -- 26 RS- 131 SunOS 5.10: kernel patch Also, since 147147-26 is a kernel patch and the non-global zone shares the same kernel with the global zone, it makes sense that this install would fail in a non-global zone. In summary, only a subset of patches are possible to install in a non-global zone. And even then, this may depend on whether you are using whole root or sparse root zones. The former will give you more flexibility to patch non-global to a different patch level than the latter will. If you don?t want the non-global to be at a different patch level than the global, then its best to just patch the global zone and get both at once. Patching the non-global is only necessary if you want it to be different than the global. Neil G. Brookins Identity and Authentication Solutions - IT Global Solutions Towers Watson 1500 Market Street | Philadelphia, PA 19102 Phone: +1 215 246 6046 neil.brook...@towerswatson.com From: pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at [ mailto:pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at] On Behalf Of Harvey, Dominic Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 7:55 PM To: pca@lists.univie.ac.at Subject: [pca] Patch xx-xx is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Why pca try to install patch for global zone, in local zone? #grep global zone only Patches_installation_2013Q2.log Patch 119764-08 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 121430-86 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 142373-03 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 140912-02 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 142088-03 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 142543-02 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 142933-05 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 143643-08 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 144742-02 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 146694-02 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 147442-01 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 147147-26 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 147143-17 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 147793-07 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 148023-03 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 148027-04 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 148029-01 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 148035-06 is for global zone only - cannot be installed on non-global zone. Patch 148043-02 is for global
