[pca] New to PCA, some questions

[raphael.debinski at postfinance.ch]

Good day,

we are currently using the Sun WebPortal for patching of our 400+ Sun servers, where we receive a patch CD based on explorer data from our servers. Unfortunately, Oracle will terminate support for that by the end of the year, hence we are looking for an alternative. Quickly we stumbled over PCA and it looks very promising, but I have some questions about it which are not answered in the documentation.

First of all, with the takeover of Oracle the winds have changed as I'm sure everybody who works with Sun has noticed. Oracle in particular is not a fan of giving anything for free and so our biggest concern with switching to PCA is the patchdiag.xref file. They already introduced the CPU patchclusters as known from DB patches in addition to the Recommended Patch Cluster, and ceased the release of Sun Alert Clusters. Does anyone know if Oracle will continue to release that file publicly and for free? As I understand, PCA relies heavily on the xref file, so if Oracle will no longer publish it, what would that mean for PCA? Would it be possible to generate the xref file by ourselfs, say based on a Recommended Patchcluster or something like that?

Secondly, based on previous experiences we have a very strict policy when it comes to patching. To minimize the risc of a bad patch, Sun used to generated the patch CD for us based on a baseline that dated two months back. Would it be possible to use an older patchdiag.xref file with PCA or does it always need the latest one? Are previous versions of the xref file downloadable from Oracle or would we have to keep our own "archive"?

Lastly, how does PCA handle "immediate reboot required" patches? There was a kernelpatch  (137137-9 IIRC) that required an immediate reboot after installation before other patches from the patchcluster could be installed. Unfortunately, the "install_patchcluster" script from Sun was quite stupid written, after installation it asked the user if the server should be rebooted and if no answer was given, after a minute it continued patching without reboot. The effect was, that the affected servers where left in an unbootable state because the kernel paniced and had to be jumpstarted again. Does PCA abort installation after an "immediate reboot required" patch was installed or does/could it reboot the server by itself and continue patching, maybe even without the intervention of a sysadmin?

Thanks in advance for any replies!


Raphael Debinski
Senior Systemspezialist Solaris

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