[pca] New to PCA, some questions

[Rajiv Gunja]

It was 118833-36 which had that issue.
Next issue was at 138888-09, when the boot-archive was introduced.
Now a days it is better to run bootadm from the mounted-patched disk before
rebooting into the patched disk (ABE)

-GGR
--
Rajiv G Gunja
Blog: http://ossrocks.blogspot.com


On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 08:59, Martin Paul <martin at par.univie.ac.at> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
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