Patching Resources

Karen Perkins, last updated on 2009-10-27

The BigAdmin Patching Center provides the latest information on patching and includes resources for patching documentation for both beginners and advanced students of patching.

New Also see New Patching Features in the Solaris 10 10/09 Release in the BigAdmin Patching Center, which describes two important new features: parallel patching of non-global zones and turbo packaging.

BigAdmin Patching Center: Patching Tools provides info on Sun patch management tools, such as Sun Ops Center and Sun Connection, which provide patch management and automation. Also provided is a link to the free, third-party Patch Check Advanced (PCA) tool*, which generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads patches.

Upgrading and Patching with Solaris Live Upgrade (registration required) provides an overview of using Solaris Live Upgrade for OS upgrades and patching, as well as an example of using Solaris Live Upgrade to upgrade from one Solaris release to a later one and an example of using Solaris Live Upgrade to patch a system.

The Patch Corner blog, by Gerry Haskins, senior engineering manager in charge of Sun's Software Release Engineering and Patch System Test groups, provides lots of patch-related information, such as:

• New Improvements to Solaris 10 Recommended and Sun Alert Patch Clusters Released
• New Zones Parallel Patching Versus Update On Attach: When to Use Which One?
• Patch forums now available on forums.sun.com for customers with support contracts
• Stricter Solaris patch entitlement implementation roll-out commencing
• Now possible to upgrade directly from Solaris 8 SPARC to latest Solaris 10 release
• Using Solaris Live Upgrade for patching
• Cannot patch Solaris 10 from Solaris 8 or 9

Also by Gerry Haskins: Podcast on Solaris Patching Policy

New Solaris 10 Patch Bundles are downloadable from the SunSolve Patch Cluster & Patch Bundle Download Page. Patch Clusters and Patch Bundles are popular collections of patches that provide specific functionality, and they contain an install script for ease of installation. For more details, see:

• New Solaris 10 5/09 Patch Bundle
• New Solaris 10 10/08 Patch Bundle
• New Solaris 10 05/08 (Update 5) Patch Bundle

New For those new to patching: Sun Learning Services videos on Solaris 10 patching:

• Book 1: Solaris 10 Patching Philosophy
• Book 2: Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices (requires login)

In addition, see the following BigAdmin resources:

• New Patching the Solaris OS Using Sun Ops Center 2.5 (Oct. 2009), by Shanthi Srinivasan and Laura Hartman
• New Analyzing a patchadd or patchrm Failure in the Solaris OS (April 2009), by Enda O'Connor
• New How to Split a Root Mirrored With Solaris Volume Manager Prior to Updating Software (April 2009), by Enda O'Connor
• New How to Remove a Solaris Patch While Booted From a Network or CD-ROM (April 2009), by Enda O'Connor
• New Patching a Miniroot Image on the Solaris 10 OS for x86 or SPARC Platforms (Feb. 2009), by Enda O'Connor
• Restrictions for Using Solaris Live Upgrade (updated Feb. 2009), by Enda O'Connor
• Patching Solaris Using Sun xVM Ops Center 1.1 (Sept. 2008)
• What Is the Solaris 10 5/08 Patch Bundle? (July 2008)
• Patch Management Best Practices (April 2008), by Enda O'Connor
• FAQ: Patching for the Solaris OS (updated Feb. 2008)
• XPert session on patching in which Sun experts provide answers to patching questions (Jan. 2008)
• Overview of Solaris Patch Types and Dependencies (Nov. 2007)
• How To Use Solaris Live Upgrade to Install Patches (Sept. 2007)
• How to Create Patch Sets for Manual Installation (June 2007)

Where to Get Previous Releases of Solaris

Here's the download web site where you can get previous releases of the Solaris OS in case you need to update your systems in two steps (for example, first to a previous Solaris release and then to the latest Solaris 10 release).