[pca] Safe patching of production systems

[Jones, Dave]

Hello all.

I'd like to bounce this off the list and see if there are any obvious
flaws in my idea or if someone has a better way to deal with a patching
issue, specifically 'time'.

We have multiple Sol9 & Sol10 systems in Production, Test, Staging, Dev,
you all know the drill.

I would like to run something like 'pca -sian' during a change window,
having the box still up at run level 3 to eliminate the 4 or 5 hours of
downtime in single user.  I know Sun says Single user, but after looking
at the patch readmes, it seems that is usually for patches that need a
reboot anyway.

Then once this is done, I hope to have a much smaller outage later in
single-user to run 'pca -ia missingrs' or the like.

I am sure someone here has a similar issue, taking a long outage doesn't
work well with business requirements or SLAs or something.

How does everyone else handle this issue?  Is my plan a good idea?
Anyone have problems with 'pca -sian' hosing a box at run level 3?

Thanks for your time.
Dave

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