[pca] Single-User revisited

[John Horne]

On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 09:44 -0400, Fred Chagnon wrote:
> I know it's an age-old question. To patch in single-user, or not. 
> 
> I'm concerned mostly about the patches that require a reconfigure
> reboot. For example sparc kernel patches 120011-14 or 127127-11. Has
> anyone had any problems applying these patches in multi-user mode on a
> running system?
> 
I applied both patches to two systems yesterday. The patches were
applied separately, and with a reconfigure reboot between them. The
systems were running in multi-user mode, but are DNS servers and as such
had no logged in 'users' as such. No problems with applying the patches.

Obviously applying patches which should be done in single-user mode is
risky. I always do just the one server completely first, rather than
trying to patch two servers at once and having them both become
unusable! Secondly, I always do a reconfigure reboot straight
afterwards. The rebooting is not the problem for me, but accessing the
server console is awkward, and so using single-user mode is awkward too.

I do not use a proxy - although I will be looking in to it at a later
date. My understanding though is that you should be able to get the
patch from the proxy to the local machine using pca (with the -n option)
when in multi-user mode. The patch is then on the local host. When it is
in single-user mode you can then just run 'pca -i' and it sees that the
patch file is already present, and so doesn't try and download it again
from the proxy. That's my understanding, but I may well be very
wrong! :-)



John.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK  Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287
E-mail: John.Horne at plymouth.ac.uk       Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001