[pca] Beginner question

[Jeff A. Earickson]

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Pennington, John wrote:

> Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 17:25:09 -0800
> From: "Pennington, John" <penningt at uchastings.edu>
> Reply-To: "PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion" <pca at lists.univie.ac.at>
> To: "PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion" <pca at lists.univie.ac.at>
> Subject: [pca] Beginner question
> 
>
>
> Hi Guys,
>
> I sort of have inherited the system admin duties as the person who used
> to do it has moved on and I have some what are probably very basic
> questions.
> Basically we have a sunfire 890 running Solaris 10 release 3 and my
> questions are,
>
> 1) The root filesystem, and a few other file systems are mirrored; will
> I need to break these mirrors before installing patches?

No.  Not unless you are getting really fancy and trying to preserve
half of the disks in case the patches go south.  But this is black-belt
sysadmin, and a lot of bother besides.

>
> 2) When I run PCA I am seeing something like 100 or patches come up.
> Should I install all these patches or just the R-- and RS- patches?

I generally do "pca" to see what is needed, "pca -i -n" to apply non-rebootables
first, then "pca -i" to do rebootables.  If there is a kernel patch there,
beware.  The conservative approach  is to put the kernel patch in someplace
like /var/tmp, take the box to single-user mode, and then use pca or patchadd
to just apply the kernel patch.  Then reboot, apply the other rebootables,
reboot again.  The riskier approach with a kernel patch is to patch in 
multi-user mode -- but get the system as quiet as you can anyway.

>
>
> Sorry if these seem pretty basic, as I said I'm new to this stuff. If
> anyone has answers to these questions or additional tips on patching I
> would certainly appreciate it.
>
>
> John
>
>
>
>