[pca] PCA Reports

[Martin Paul]

little help wrote:
>     I am running some reports via PCA and had a quick question about the
> "List:" portion of the output that s generated via PCA. I am trying to
> generate a report of missing patches against all possible patches for a
> host.  For example can I get pca to report that I am missing 20 out of a
> possible 200 patches for this host.  I need to report what percentage of
> patches are missing from a host.

Determining the number of missing patches is simple - just look at the first 
number X after "List: missing (X/Y)". The number Y is actually kind of useless; 
I seem to remember that it was proposed by some PCA user as a rough indicator of 
how outdated a system is.

As for the number of possible patches for a system, it's not so easy to find a 
concrete number for that. Using PCA's --fromfiles option, you could feed an 
empty "showrev -p" output to PCA and then look at the number of missing patches 
again. This is only half correct, though, as any Solaris update version (like 
Solaris 10 9/10) already comes with a number of patches pre-installed. So 
actually you would need to save "showrev -p" output right after installing the 
system, before any patch gets installed, and use that as input to PCA.

I'm not sure whether this percentage of missing vs. applicable patches is really 
a useful number anyway. After all the only interesting number is how many 
patches are missing. And maybe not even that, as the importance of impact of two 
patches can be very different - a system missing a kernel patch might be assumed 
to be more outdated than one which is missing two patches for some obscure 
packages which no one uses.

Martin.