[pca] PCA Best Practices?

[Ray Van Dolson]

Hello all.  I've long been frustrated by the way Solaris updates seem
to work.  I'm used to the Linux world where a simple yum update or
up2date command can show me what's available and makes it easy to
apply.

smpatch, Solaris Update Manager all had their weird little quirks.
I've just been looking for a way to easily get all Solaris machines to
send me nightly notification of what patches are available so it
becomes as easy to keep them up to date as it is our Linux machines.
pca appears to fit that need perfectly!

How are most of you using it in your infrastructure?  I'm starting to
add it to cron jobs to email me nightly output of pca -l missing and
I'm thinking of parsing the output from this into a database so we can
get a good overview of what systems need what at a glance.  In
addition, is it possible to point pca at a local patch server?  Sounds
like the dev version lets you do some caching so we can avoid
re-downloading things from Sun unnecessarily.

Anyways, just looking for some best practices and suggestions from all
you pca veterans out there.

TIA
Ray