[pca] PCA will not download or install from sunsolve

[Shane VanderVoort]

Thanks for the explanation, I have been testing PCA for the last couple of days and it seems to work sometimes, like you said it appears as though it is suns issue, I will continue to test and see what happens. 
Thanks Shane V

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Paul [mailto:martin at par.univie.ac.at] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 4:35 AM
To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion
Subject: Re: [pca] PCA will not download or install from sunsolve

Shane VanderVoort wrote:
> I have tried dozens of times with the same results within
> the last 4 hours (patch not found) and (Missing patch file) Error 500
> from Suns web servers when I run it in -V Verbose mode.  I can't
> believe SUN's site has been down or unavailable or maybe I can but
> highly doubtful for this long.

This is (unfortunately) a known problem which happens from time to time.

Some background information:

When pca connects to the sunsolve.sun.com server to download a patch, it 
is really connecting to a load balancer, which directs the download 
request to one of the machines in sunsolve's server pool. Sometimes one 
of the machines in the pool is broken, returning "internal server error" 
all the time until it is fixed/rebooted/whatever by Sun staff.

As different users get directed at different servers, only some have 
problems (e.g. I just downloaded about 50 patches with pca without a 
single error).

Now another part of the problem is that the load balancer seems to cache 
information about which IP is directed to which server, so you get 
directed to the same (broken) server all the time. So the only thing you 
can do is to wait for either the broken machine to be fixed (no one 
knows how long this takes) or wait long enough to make the cached 
information on the load balancer to be thrown away (a few hours or maybe 
a day - we don't have insight on that).

I understand that this is frustrating. The only things pca requires from 
Sun is daily updates to the patchdiag.xref file and a stable HTTP 
service from sunsolve.sun.com. Sun can't provide either, as the last 
years have shown. I still hope you won't give up on pca yet.

Martin.