Happy Birthday, PCA! What a great program, Martin! You would think Sun would
have just licensed your code and spent their energies on other things.
Patching is never fun and usually tedious but PCA actually made the task
enjoyable, at least from the standpoint of looking at the output and knowing my
system was fully patched without having to babysit an install or trying to
figure out what to install and in what order.
Thanks again!
Scott
-Original Message-
From: pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at [mailto:pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at] On
Behalf Of Martin Paul
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 4:08 AM
To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion
Cc: pca-n...@lists.univie.ac.at
Subject: EXT :[pca] PCA is 10!
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
