[pca] rebuild patch level

[Don O'Malley]

Martin Paul wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Ihsan Dogan wrote:
>> Is it possible to install only the missing patches on host a, which 
>> are installed on host b?
>
> A flash archive, as suggested by Michele, is definitely the best way 
> to go.
>
> If that's not an option, you can get a list of all patches installed 
> on host b (in the correct order) with "ls -rt /var/sadm/patch/". You 
> could then feed this list into "pca -i" on host a. Never tried that in 
> a real-world scenario, though. E.g. some driver patches might not 
> apply to host a, if it isn't the same architecture as host b.
Just to reiterate Martin's point here, to use a flash archive (flar) 
from one system and apply it to another both machines should be as 
closely matched as possible.
They'll obviously need to have the same system architecture and ideally 
should be the same model (i.e. from one SunFire T2000 to another SunFire 
T2000), to ensure that the drivers from machine a will work on machine b.

I've used flars to clone test systems before and have to say that they 
are extremely useful for scenarios that are suited to them.
You need to be careful using flars with systems that have certain 
machine specific configurations. For example, suppose you have a machine 
- machine1 - that is running a web server and the web server's 
configuration file contains a reference to the hostname - say 
machine1.mydomain.com. If you take a flar of that machine and apply it 
to another similar system - machine2 - then the new system will have a 
web server configuration file with a reference to  machine1.mydomain.com...

Also, flars do not play well with zones, so if your machine is a Solaris 
10 machine with zones, you may need to look for an alternative...

HTH,
-Don
>
> Martin.
>