[pca] Error 500 errors a thing of the past, and 403 now more reliable!

[Don O'Malley]

Hi,

SunSolve have in the past month deployed a new patch download service - 
getupdates2.sun.com - which, amongst other improvements, leverages 
Akamai to ensure faster and more reliable patch download for Sun customers.

While getupdates2.sun.com has greatly improved customer's patch download 
experience, there was one minor bug in the new service, whereby 
customers experienced transient patch download failures from 
getupdates2.sun.com.
Yesterday morning (Pacific Time) there was a fix deployed to address 
this bug.

This bug was responsible for customers experiencing intermittent "ERROR 
403: Service Error" or "ERROR 500: Server Error" responses when 
attempting to download a patch, with error messages similar to the 
following from a wget call (customers accessing patches via a browser 
would have seen a similar ERROR message):

--15:14:55--  http://sunsolve.sun.com/pdownload.do?target=140778-01&method=h
           => `/tmp/140778-01.zip'
Resolving sunsolve.sun.com... 192.18.109.62
Connecting to sunsolve.sun.com|192.18.109.62|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: https://getupdates2.sun.com/all_unsigned/140778-01.zip [following]
--15:14:57--  https://getupdates2.sun.com/all_unsigned/140778-01.zip
           => `/tmp/140778-01.zip'
Resolving getupdates2.sun.com... 198.232.168.157
Connecting to getupdates2.sun.com|198.232.168.157|:443... connected.
WARNING: Certificate verification error for getupdates2.sun.com: self signed certificate in certificate chain
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Service Error
15:15:00 ERROR 403: Service Error.


--15:15:15--  http://sunsolve.sun.com/pdownload.do?target=140778-01&method=h
           => `/tmp/140778-01.zip'
Resolving sunsolve.sun.com... 192.18.109.113
Connecting to sunsolve.sun.com|192.18.109.113|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: https://getupdates2.sun.com/all_unsigned/140778-01.zip [following]
--15:15:16--  https://getupdates2.sun.com/all_unsigned/140778-01.zip
           => `/tmp/140778-01.zip'
Resolving getupdates2.sun.com... 198.232.168.157
Connecting to getupdates2.sun.com|198.232.168.157|:443... connected.
WARNING: Certificate verification error for getupdates2.sun.com: self signed certificate in certificate chain
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 500 Server Error
15:15:19 ERROR 500: Server Error.



Now that the fix for this bug has been deployed these errors should no 
longer occur.

If a patch you attempt to download from SunSolve/getupdates2 now fails, 
then the most likely reason will be that you are not entitled to 
download that patch (as you do not have the correct support contract).
In such cases you will see a "ERROR 403: Forbidden" error message from 
SunSolve or "ERROR 403: You are not entitled to retrieve this content.." 
error message from getupdates2.sun.com similar to the following:

--11:41:44--  http://sunsolve.sun.com/pdownload.do?target=127721-02&method=h
           => `/tmp/127721-02.zip'
Resolving sunsolve.sun.com... 192.18.108.40
Connecting to sunsolve.sun.com|192.18.108.40|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
11:41:45 ERROR 403: Forbidden.


--11:46:21--  http://sunsolve.sun.com/pdownload.do?target=127721-02&method=h
           => `/tmp/127721-02.zip'
Resolving sunsolve.sun.com... 192.18.109.113
Connecting to sunsolve.sun.com|192.18.109.113|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: https://getupdates2.sun.com/all_unsigned/127721-02.zip [following]
--11:46:23--  https://getupdates2.sun.com/all_unsigned/127721-02.zip
           => `/tmp/127721-02.zip'
Resolving getupdates2.sun.com... 198.232.168.157
Connecting to getupdates2.sun.com|198.232.168.157|:443... connected.
WARNING: Certificate verification error for getupdates2.sun.com: self signed certificate in certificate chain
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 You are not entitled to retrieve this content.
11:46:27 ERROR 403: You are not entitled to retrieve this content..


Of course it is possible that SunSolve and/or getupdates2.sun.com may be 
unavailable (or more likely in maintenance) at particular periods, in 
which case patch downloads would also obviously be unavailable.
Sun will do its best to communicate such outages, but generally 
customers downloading patches from Sun will experience a further 
improved patch download service going forward.
(For example: I have tested this in production over the past 20 hours 
and have made over 1900 wget patch download requests. All have been 
successful.)

I realize that there has been a lot of frustration experienced by a lot 
of customers to get to the point where we are now (and for this Sun 
apologizes), but going forward these frustrations should be a thing of 
the past.

If you have any further questions, or you are still experiencing 
problems with the SunSolve patch download service, please let me know.

(Note: For those using the new Sun Patch Form, there is a similar 
posting there (http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5406905).
The Sun Patch Forum is only for contract customers and requires a 
once-off setup procedure, outlined in  
http://blogs.sun.com/patch/entry/patch_forums_now_available_for)

Best,
-Don