[pca] Stricter Solaris patch entitlement

[Martin Paul]

Changes in enforcement of the current patch access policy are about to 
be rolled out by Sun starting this week:

   http://blogs.sun.com/patch/date/20090105

So what does that mean for pca users?

If you use pca to generate patch reports only, but not to download and 
install patches, nothing changes.

If you have a support contract connected to the Sun Online Account used 
with pca to download patches, nothing changes.

If you do not have a support contract - you are using a free Sun Online 
Account - you already experienced that you could only download a subset 
of patches with pca. This subset has now been reduced to a much smaller 
number of patches, still containing at least all security patches.

At present, you can download any revision of a patch as long it contains 
at least one security fix. In a second phase of policy enforcement (to 
be done at a later time) only the revisions which actually contain 
security fixes will be available for free. Example: Patch 123456-01 
contains a security fix. Later, 123456-02 is published, containing a 
non-security fix. You will be able to download 123456-01, but not 123456-02.

The patchdiag.xref file currently only contains information about the 
most current revision of each patch. For pca to determine the set of 
missing security patch revisions, it would be necessary to have 
information about the last security revision of each patch as well. 
There are no plans for Sun to add this information to the patchdiag.xref 
file. You will have to check all Sun Alerts or patch READMEs to come up 
with a list of all free security patch revisions.

Of course Sun has limited resources and is concentrating them on 
customers with support contracts. I currently have no idea whether the 
majority of the pca users do have support contracts or not. So if you 
are affected by the planned changes, this is your chance to make 
yourself heard. Feel free to comment either via the "Comments" link in 
the above blog entry or on the pca mailing list.

Regards,

Martin.