[pca] Beginner question

[Rajiv Gunja]

John,
It is always a good idea to break the mirror and patch 1 disk first than
attempting to patch a mirrored root filesystem.
I have seen issues with Veritas based mirroring after patching while the
disks were mirrored. But those systems were of very old patch level.

One of the main advantages of breaking the mirror is that there is no
wasting time in bring down the OS and applications. You can install all your
patches on 1 OS disk while the other one is still live, thus saving you 2 to
6 hours of patching that needs to be done in single user-mode depending on
the number of patches you have to install. This method is written up in
detail by SUN - Live Upgrade Patching. Please read it before attempt
anything.

At my company, we use LU (Live Upgrade) Patching on all our 3000+ servers.
The only downtime you need is to reboot the server and encapsulate the root
disk, mirror it back.

As to your second question: Do not install the latest and greatest on your
production servers. First test the patches on a test server. When you
generate a list of patches (missing | mirringr | mirringrs) cross reference
the patches listed with the SUN Alerts, there are some nasty patches our
there which do not play well with certain OS / 3rd party applications.

I always use "missing" to get all patches, but I patch my servers once every
quarter.

Hope this helps.

-GGR

--
Rajiv G Gunja
Blog: http://ossrocks.blogspot.com


2008/12/1 Pennington, John <penningt at uchastings.edu>

>
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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