[pca] Support Levels

[Jeff Earickson]

Martin,

Thanks for adding this feature, I just tried it (after fiddling with
my firewall, this
feature requires http/https access to "support.oracle.com" and
"login.oracle.com").
The information I got meshes with my idea of the support that I am paying for.

While I have seen a lot of grumbling about the Sunsolve->Oracle changeover on
this list, I have to say that it went flawlessly for me.  I got my
daily reports of patches
that I could apply (a cron job of just "pca" output), and I could
successfully apply
patches when I wanted to.  Maybe my success was because I was in the US and
not in Europe...

Jeff Earickson
Colby College

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 5:52 AM, Martin Paul <martin at par.univie.ac.at> wrote:
> Recently Mike Brown provided a document ID (1269292.1, available on My
> Oracle Support) which explains the correlation between Support Contracts,
> Support Levels and Patches.
>
> In short, a certain Support Level is required to access any patch. A certain
> type of Support Contract includes one or more Support Levels. Only if these
> match, one is allowed to download a patch. This explains some effects seen
> recently, e.g. Sun Studio Patches (require Support Level "Software") not
> being available for customers with a "Premier Support for Operating Systems"
> (Support Level "Operating System", formerly known as "Basic Solaris
> Subscription" or similar).
>
> In the current development release of PCA (20101220-01) I added two things:
>
> (1) A new command line option "--supplevel", which contacts My Oracle
> Support and shows the Support Levels of a given MOS Account. Example:
>
>  $ pca --user user at domain.org --passwd secret --supplevel
>  Determining MOS Support Levels
>
>  OS: Solaris patches and updates
>  PUB: Oracle Open Office/StarOffice and patch utilities
>  $
>
> (2) A new section called SUPPORT LEVELS in PCA's documentation which
> explains the concept and which includes a table of possible Support Levels
> and Support Contract Coverage. See "pca --man" or:
>
>  http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/usaged.html#support_levels
>
> Much of the information has been taken from the above mentioned Knowledge
> Article.
>
> PCA will still not be able to tell you which patches are accessible when
> using a certain MOS Account without actually trying to download it. For that
> to work, Oracle would have to include a new column in patchdiag.xref,
> specifying the required Support Level to download a patch.
>
> Martin.
>
>