[pca] New to PCA, some questions

[Martin Paul]

Hi Raphael,

Welcome to a new prospective PCA user! :)

> 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?

PCA would be unusable without patchdiag.xref, as it contains all 
information about the patches. Theoretically, it would be possible to 
generate patchdiag.xref from the information included in the patches, 
but it would mean that one needs access to all patch ZIP files to 
generate a complete patchdiag.xref file.

As for whether the file will continue to be available - no idea. Maybe 
Don O'Malley from Oracle will jump in here, but I'm afraid that you 
won't get any guarantee. I see no reason why Oracle should stop 
delivering the xref file, especially as they want to switch to a 
completely new packaging system (IPS) in the next Solaris release. Why 
break the existing interfaces then?

> 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"?

Being able to use old versions of the xref file is actually an important 
feature in PCA. Like that, you can patch different systems to the same 
baseline by simply pointing PCA at a certain copy of the xref file.

Oracle only provides the most recent version of xref, so you should 
collect and save your own copies.

> 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.

It was 118833/118855 as far as I remember. PCA will handle it correctly, 
in that it stops patching and shows the message displayed by patchadd. 
Sun use a quite intelligent method to disable further patching (by 
loopback-mounting a file from /var/run over the patch command), so if 
there should ever be another patch using the same method (it was the 
only one until now) PCA will handle it correctly, too.

> 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?

PCA will not reboot automatically. The only modifications it ever makes 
to a system is through the "patchadd" command; everything else are 
read-only operations, as far as the OS is concerned.

Theoretically, you could use a script which runs pca to install patches, 
reboots if needed (see output of PCA or exit value) and which does that 
in a loop until all patches are applied. This is usually not necessary, 
though: Unless 118833/118855 is involved, installing all patches at once 
followed by a single reboot is enough.

Hope this answers your questions for now,

Martin.