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How to Create Patch Sets for Manual Installation

Juergen Fleischer, December 2006 (Updated June 2007)

The core business of Sun Connection's satellite deployment architecture (also known as Sun Update Connection - Enterprise) is to fully automate all patch management tasks, including analysis, dependency resolving, staging, and final installation. Although this should be the ultimate goal, there are possible scenarios where Sun Connection might not perform the final installation. For example, the SysAdmin group is responsible for providing standard patch sets, but the IT-Operations group is responsible for the actual installation using the traditional method. Another possible scenario is the installation of the patches into an alternate boot environment, not the current running root environment.

How can we perform such a task?

Sun Connection allows you to run a job in simulation mode. All dependencies are resolved and the needed patches are downloaded to the client to be available when you rerun the job in deploy mode. When the simulation job has finished, the patches are stored as binary large objects (blobs) in the /agent/blobs directory, and the results of the dependency and order resolution can be found in the log file.

The agent directory location changed in Sun Connection, version 1.1.

• In Sun Connection, beginning with version 1.1, the log file is located at /var/opt/SUNWuce/agent.
• In Sun Connection versions earlier than 1.1, the log file is located at /var/lib/uce/agent/logs/resolve.log.

The local pre-action script create_patchset creates a directory /var/tmp/patchset, analyzes the resolve.log file to create a patch_order file, and copies all patches into the patch set directory. Detected firmware or flash PROM patches are moved into a subdirectory called firmware+flashprom.

Finally, a script install_all_patches is placed into the patch set for manual installation. To create a patch set, we have to run a standard patch job in simulate mode followed by a job in deploy mode with the task to run the pre-action script create_patchset. That's all. We have now a standalone patch set for traditional manual installation or for installation into an alternate boot environment.

The following scripts are available for creating patch sets:

• create_patchset_v2 - Use this script if you are using at least Sun Connection version 1.1.
• create_patchset_v1 - Use this script if you are using Sun Update Connection - Enterprise or Sun Connection versions earlier than 1.1.

More Information

For more information about using Sun Connection, go to the Sun Connection information hub.

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