Re: [pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!?
Don O'Malley wrote: In the case of EMC, the date I heard for a hotfix for EMC PowerPath was the 7th October. To get further information you need to follow up with the ISV in question. I just read this in one of the Oracle forums: I confirm that the updated version of PowerPath (5.3.P02_b001) which EMC has released on time (Oct 7, 2011) solves the problem. After updating to that PowerPath release we managed to successfully update Solaris kernel to 144500-19 and subsequently to 147440-03. (Including upgrade to Solaris 10 Update 10 worked fine too). https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2265993tstart=0start=15 And as far as PCA is concerned - I will change the behaviour of the ignore option in a way that ignored patches will always be ignored, even if the patch is required by another patch. I've been convinced that this is a more reasonable and expected behaviour, and it will be more helpful in situations like this. Martin.
Re: [pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!?
Tate, Robert B wrote: Thank you! I missed that. I would argue that is should ignore it as requested and then show that the others were ignored also when they were done. Or a separate option to Force the ignore anyway. I see the reason for not doing it that way also, but the only problem with that is that (in this case) we end up with an unbootable system. I agree that the current behaviour is unexpected; to be honet, I had to take a close look myself to realise it. After looking at the code and thinking about alternatives, I'm still unsure about a better behaviour. A --strict option could be added, which would enforce strict ignoring, even if a patch is required by another one. Due to the recursive dependency checking, it would be hard to ignore the requiring patch, too, though. So it'll end up with patches in the list which will fail to install because of missing dependencies. Anyway - the good thing is that such situations usually don't happen - the issue hasn't come up in the last years. This one is kind of special - normally a patch with ill effects is marked as BAD and an older revision is reinstated. Then PCA will show the last good revision, and everything is fine. This kernel patch doesn't have a previous revision, and it obsoleted a lot of other patches, which would have to be reinstated as well. Maybe the problem was deemed not to be serious enough, to rectify that amount of work. I did see a 'whitelist' referred to in the update logs. What is that used for? It's used with PCA's --safe option. Before installing a patch, it uses pkgchk to see whether any of the files which come with the patch have local modifications. This is to warn you from e.g. /var/yp/Makefile or sendmail.cf being overwritten without notice. There isn't a 100% consistency in the pkgchk database, and the whitelist is used to ignore certain files in the check. This is a awesome program and has saved my tail on a bunch of systems when Oracle stopped supporting smpatch on Sol 8 and 9 systems (I still have a few left). Thanks! Martin.
Re: [pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!?
Hi Robert, I'll leave the whitelist/blacklist stuff to Martin. I'm more interested in why you're ending up in the panic loop! Are you running EMC PowerPath? If so - check out https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=showtype=NOTid=1358671.1 We have also seen similar nasty reactions to 144500-19 with the following multipathing products: Hitachi HDS Falconstor Dynapath CA Access Control SeOS It seems like in all cases the problem occurs when the multipathing product uses a private Solaris interface, which patch 144500-19 changes. Bottom line is that patch 144500-19 is not compatible with the effected products. To try prevent customers hitting the most prevalent of these issues, which is EMC PowerPath, we have worked with EMC to construct logic which will prevent patch 144500-19 from applying to susceptible systems. This logic is delivered in patch 12-11 (released Monday 19th September). This patch is now in the Recommended Patchset. HTH, -Don Tate, Robert B wrote: Installing this patch puts many of our systems into endless reboots. I have used the following command line to try and exclude this patch (and some others), but it still shows up in the lists. I found a white list in the program which seems to override my commands. Is this correct? How can I get around this? I cannot allow this to be installed until this is fixed and cant get pca to not install it. To get a listing, this is what I use: /usr/tools/adm/SunOS/bin/pca -y -X/usr/tools/adm/SunOS/pca \ --pattern="!VRTS|VERITAS|NetBackup|VxVM|SYMC" \ --ignore=144500-19 --ignore=121430-66 --ignore=127655-07 -l (/usr/tools is a commen NFS mounted tools area we use). - L Robert B. Tate UNIX Systems Administrator, Stf Lockheed Martin - EBS Enterprise BusinessServices Engineering and Computing UNIX Systems Support (ECUSS) Email: mailto:robert.b.t...@lmco.com Office Phone: (407) 306-2720(M-Thu) Home Phone: (407) 830-7319 (Fri) Faster, Cheaper, Reliable: Pick any two. -- Don O'Malley Manager,Patch System Test Revenue Product Engineering | Solaris | Hardware East Point Business Park, Dublin 3, Ireland Phone: +353 1 8199764 Team Alias: rpe_patch_system_test...@oracle.com
Re: [pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!?
Tate, Robert B wrote: I don't know why there is a whitelist at all or why it overrides the wishes of the user. I will look to see if I can find an older version that works. I hadn't thought of that. It's not the whitelist which causes this, so an older version of PCA won't help here. Actually, this behaviour is documented: --ignore=WHAT Ignore certain patches. The patch will not be listed, downloaded or installed unless it is required by another patch. ^^ The problem here is that there are other patches which do require 144500. In the case of such a patch dependency, PCA ignores the various options which would remove a required patch from the list - this affects ignore, stop, minage/maxage, pattern and the r/s operand postfixes. One can argue whether this is expected behaviour, but acting differently in this case would open up a lot more questions: If PCA would ignore (ie. not list) 144500 in this example, should it still list the patches which require it, even if they will then fail to install? Or should these patches be silently ignored as well? What if a required patch doesn't match pattern, or if a required patch isn't marked 'R' and pca -l missingr is used - should these be stricyly ignored as well, or are these criteria less hard than ignore? It's not that I'm not open to implement this in a different way, I just think that it's hard to find a solution which fits all. Anyway - in this example and with PCA as it is, one option is to ignore all patches which require 144500 as well. With pca --debug that's easy to find out. I ended up with: pca --ignore 144500 --ignore 143643 --ignore 147151 --ignore 147153 \ --ignore 147159 --ignore 147161 --ignore 147434 --ignore 147436 \ --ignore 147440 Or you use a modified copy of patchdiag.xref, from which you remove the line for 144500. Without any information about 144500, PCA will not list it. Martin.
Re: [pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!?
Robert, Do you have access to pca version 20110329-01 or older? The change log (http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/changes.html) shows 144500 was added to whitelist following that release. With all the alerts on 144500 (this week added - Solaris 10 Kernel Patches 144500-19 and 144501-19 may Cause a Panic in Systems Using Storage Multi-Pathing [ID 1359919.1] - I would think we should recommend against installing 144500-19. I see MOS Patches Updates does not have any older versions of 144500-19 but from the README there were many. Is it normal for a kernel patch to NOT be recommended? GlenG From: pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at [mailto:pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at] On Behalf Of Robert B Tate Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 1:51 PM To: Glen Gunselman; pca@lists.univie.ac.at Subject: [pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!? Installing this patch puts many of our systems into endless reboots. I have used the following command line to try and exclude this patch (and some others), but it still shows up in the lists. I found a white list in the program which seems to override my commands. Is this correct? How can I get around this? I cannot allow this to be installed until this is fixed and can't get pca to not install it. To get a listing, this is what I use: /usr/tools/adm/SunOS/bin/pca -y -X/usr/tools/adm/SunOS/pca \ --pattern=!VRTS|VERITAS|NetBackup|VxVM|SYMC \ --ignore=144500-19 --ignore=121430-66 --ignore=127655-07 -l (/usr/tools is a commen NFS mounted tools area we use). - L Robert B. Tate UNIX Systems Administrator, Stf Lockheed Martin - EBS Enterprise Business Services Engineering and Computing UNIX Systems Support (ECUSS) Email: mailto:robert.b.t...@lmco.com Office Phone: (407) 306-2720 (M-Thu) Home Phone: (407) 830-7319 (Fri) Faster, Cheaper, Reliable: Pick any two.
