[pca] patchdiag.xref for CPU

[Martin Paul]

Jeff,

Thanks a lot for giving the script a try and reporting the results. I'm 
surprised that it worked so fine on the first attempt. Using it with the Update 
cluster is an interesting application, too - good idea!

I have now put the mkxref script on the "Contrib" section of the PCA webpage. If 
others use it and find any bugs, please let me know. If this proves to be useful 
and I get more feedback from other admins, I might later integrate the 
functionality into PCA itself.

Martin.

Jeff wrote:
> OK, I tested this and it works great.  Using the patchdiag created from the
> CPU, I was able to download, install and reboot the server in the amount of
> time it would take me to copy the 2GB tarball and start extracting it, and
> instead of having to try installing each of the 200+ patches like the
> installcluster script, I installed only what I needed.  A huge time savings,
> and the end results were the same patches got installed whether I used pca
> with the custom patchdiag or the installcluster script.
> 
> I also tried the same thing using the Update 9 patch cluster.  The patch
> cluster contains 648 patches, that was knocked down to 120 patches, so you
> can definitely see a huge timesavings there.  Only thing I had to do was
> install patch 144401-09 manually, which is only available in the Update 9
> cluster, not downloadable from MOS.  That patch modifies the /etc/release
> file to reflect that you are running at the patch equivalent of Update 9.
> 
> Awesome job Martin, great solution to the problem.
> 
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 9:41 AM, Jeff <variverrat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Just to add another thought.  Another great use for this would be with the
>> bundles that are created to patch to a update level rather then doing a
>> LiveUpgrade.
>>
>> I'll try it against the Update 9 patch bundle and see what happens.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Jeff <variverrat at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This is awesome Martin, my guess is it might make a patchdiag file more
>>> accurate then the real one since it would use the info that patchadd would
>>> use to decide if it needs to be installed.
>>>
>>> I'll give it a test and see if the results match if I installed the CPU
>>> from the bundled install scripts, but I think this is a great solution.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 8:26 AM, Martin Paul <martin at par.univie.ac.at>wrote:
>>>
>>>> After the idea came up to create a special patchdiag.xref which only
>>>> includes the patches of a Critical Patch Cluster (CPU), I couldn't resist
>>>> and gave it a try.
>>>>
>>>> I downloaded the "CPU OS Cluster 2011/04 Solaris 10 SPARC" and hacked up
>>>> a script (mkxref, see attachment) which extracts the necessary information
>>>> from the patch READMEs, patchinfo and pkginfo files and creates a
>>>> patchdiag.xref file. The idea is that this can then be used with PCA to
>>>> patch systems to the state of the CPU without actually having to download
>>>> the +2GB file (on every system).
>>>>
>>>> Take care: The script is mostly untested. It's hard to verify whether the
>>>> patchdiag.xref it creates is 100% correct. It works with PCA, and I've
>>>> compared a few sample patches with their entries in the real xref file, and
>>>> they looked fine. The Recommended/Security flags are missing (they are not
>>>> in the patchinfo file), but this shouldn't matter.
>>>>
>>>> I'm including both the script and the patchdiag.xref file I created from
>>>> the above mentioned CPU. If anybody does some experiments with it, I'd be
>>>> happy to hear about it. Theoretically, one can generate xref files for any
>>>> set of patches with the script, which might be of use in other regards than
>>>> with the CPU as well.
>>>>
>>>> Martin.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jeff
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jeff
>>