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] PCA is 10!
Thanks Martin, your work has saved time, money and a lot of frustration. I am sure a lot of Companies owe their efficiency to your work 10 years ago. Thank you for contributing such an awesome tool/work to open source. -GG On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Diana Orrick orr...@fsu.edu wrote: Congratulations!! Many thanks for the incredible body of work that is PCA. On 9/9/2013 7:08 AM, Martin Paul wrote: 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) -- ~~**~~~ Diana Mayer Orrick Assistant Director, Unix Systems Infrastructure and Operations Support Information Technology Services The Florida State University
[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 nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
Hi Martin Congratulations and thanks for 10 years of supporting Solaris admins. With the Recommended Bundle topping 2GB a while ago, the efficiency in only downloading needed patches makes a real saving in time and download charges. Like you I am moving away from Solaris to Linux. I have a couple of old Solaris boxes here at home, not patched for a couple of years, can't justify the maintenance costs. Pretty soon they'll go the way of other old computers: off to the recyclers. regards, -glenn On Mon, September 9, 2013 9:08 pm, Martin Paul wrote: 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)
Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
Happy birthday :-) D@niel -Message d'origine- De : pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at [mailto:pca-boun...@lists.univie.ac.at] De la part de Martin Paul Envoyé : lundi 9 septembre 2013 13:08 À : PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion Cc : pca-n...@lists.univie.ac.at Objet : [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 nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
Happy Birthday PCA, and Martin, thanks for all the time saved! My only regret: not having tried it earlier :-) One reason that for me, Solaris 11 feels like a regression, is just that: no pca there. Laurent On 09/09/13 13:08, Martin Paul wrote: 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)
Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
Happy Birthday PCA (which is exactly 2 years older than my son) It saved me lot of hours ... Thanks again ! One wish : develop the same on other OS ! (nothing completely equivalent/easy to use/powerful) Best regards Pierre-Yves Martin Paul martin.p...@univie.ac.at wrote: 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)
Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
Martin, Thanks for PCA, it saved me a ton of time and aggravation compared to Solaris 8/9/10's lame patching mechanism. I too consider Solaris as dead as the dodo bird. The second I heard that Oracle had bought Sun, I said no more Sun here, since I hate Oracle's support. The final straw was Solaris 11. I had experimented with S11 beta releases on my existing hardware and it worked fine, but when Oracle released the official S11, I found out that nearly all of my hardware had been obsoleted -- S11 would not install on it. What better reason to get rid of it then? I have two S10 systems left, both will be gone by next summer. I have told the Oracle sales guys to quit calling me. Linux on VMware, that is the way to go! --- Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D Senior Server System Administrator Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill, Waterville ME, 04901-8842 207-859-4214 (fax 207-859-4186) Eastern Time Zone, USA --- On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 7:08 AM, Martin Paul martin.p...@univie.ac.atwrote: 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
Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
Hi Martin, Happy 10th birthday PCA. Let's hope your post wasn't your swan song. You understood the preference for a simple command-line patching tool rather than phaffing with a GUI or remembering passwords and battling through the over-complicated web-standards-breaking bloat that is MOS which, even in it's no flash version, was no more standards-compliant than Metalink that preceded it: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://supporthtml.oracle.com/ http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://supporthtml.oracle.com/epmos/faces/MosInd ex.jspx I'm only sorry you won't be around in the S11 community to provide the depth of peer-level support to me and no-doubt countless others. Sun and Oracle's support for community initiatives like PCA has been grudging at best (a blinkered attitude to a source of innovation). Thank you Martin for a decade of service to the Solaris community.
Re: [pca] PCA is 10!
Congratulations!! Many thanks for the incredible body of work that is PCA. On 9/9/2013 7:08 AM, Martin Paul wrote: 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) -- ~ Diana Mayer Orrick Assistant Director, Unix Systems Infrastructure and Operations Support Information Technology Services The Florida State University orr...@fsu.edu - (850) 645-8009 ~
