[pca] PCA is 10!

[Jeff Earickson]

Martin,

Thanks for PCA, it saved me a ton of time and aggravation compared to
Solaris 8/9/10's lame patching mechanism.

I too consider Solaris as dead as the dodo bird.  The second I heard that
Oracle had bought Sun, I said "no more Sun here", since I hate Oracle's
support.  The final straw was Solaris 11.  I had experimented with S11 beta
releases on my existing hardware and it worked fine, but when Oracle
released the official S11, I found out that nearly all of my hardware had
been "obsoleted" -- S11 would not install on it.  What better reason to get
rid of it then?

I have two S10 systems left, both will be gone by next summer.  I have told
the Oracle sales guys to quit calling me.  Linux on VMware, that is the way
to go!

-----------------------------------
Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D
Senior Server System Administrator
Colby College,
4214 Mayflower Hill,
Waterville ME, 04901-8842
207-859-4214 (fax 207-859-4186)
Eastern Time Zone, USA
-----------------------------------


On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 7:08 AM, Martin Paul <martin.paul at univie.ac.at>wrote:

> PCA is 10!
>
> Scrolling down on the PCA-News web page, at the very bottom, one finds
> this message: "2003/09/09: First version. Introducing PCA 1.0". So it's
> really 10 years now since I decided to make this script public, after I've
> been using it for some time internally. It had 208 lines at that time.
>
> Only one day later I received the first e-mail with the subject "pca" from
> Andrew Brooks, which was a lot like the many messages I received in the
> next ten years:
>
> First, he thanked for the useful script. Such comments from PCA users
> turned out to be my main motivation to maintain and refine PCA in the
> following years. So thanks to all of you who ever sent positive comments!
>
> Second, he provided an idea (and included code) for some new function (a
> new option -H to output HTML) which I immediately decided *not* to include
> in the official version of PCA :-) In my answer I stated that I wanted to
> keep PCA as simple as possible, not depending on some URLs staying
> consistent on Sun's web page. I always liked Unix for its tradition of
> simple commands which can be used in pipes to achieve great things.
>
> Soon other PCA users provided more and more input and I started to add new
> functions and options over the time, always weighing simplicity against
> usefulness. The option to download patches from Sun directly was probably
> one of the most useful, and the one which caused me most work in the last
> years. Sun (and later Oracle) turned the simple process of downloading a
> patch file via FTP into a complicated procedure with authentication, server
> redirects, dependencies on certain HTTP features etc. which I always had to
> follow closely to keep the download functions in PCA working. There were
> moments when I seriously thought about giving up on it.
>
> While I knew that Sun engineers were using PCA themselves, and Sun never
> succeeded in providing a own, working patch administration tool (I would
> have been the first to switch, believe me!) they never officially
> acknowledged PCA, although it was recommended on some Sun websites and PDFs.
>
> As I got a lot of e-mails in the meantime from admins asking about the
> usage of PCA and me answering the same questions over and over again, I
> created the PCA mailing lists (for those interested in numbers, I have 4827
> messages in my folder with private PCA communication, and 3139 messages on
> the PCA mailing list - I definitely wrote more text than code). This helped
> a lot, as power users now answered the queries from beginners. I also had a
> lot more contact to the users of PCA and was fascinated in how many
> different ways and procedures it was being used. I also got in contact with
> Gerry Haskins and Don O'Malley from Sun, which made it a lot easier to sort
> out problems and to get information about the internals of Sun's patch
> creation and publication. Thanks to both of them for their help and
> patience!
>
> With the appearance of Solaris 11 and its IPS system, traffic on the
> mailing list was reduced a lot. As PCA is not needed anymore on Solaris 11,
> it is now being used mostly by experienced admins running Solaris 10 who
> already know what they do. Personally, I also think that PCA is feature
> complete for quite some time now, and as (now) Oracle doesn't change their
> patch infrastructure anymore, new versions of PCA have been reduced to a
> minimum.
>
> As far as I'm concerned, that's very welcome. While I still work with some
> Solaris systems, we're moving away from Solaris here slowly, due to the
> high prices of Oracle hardware and support. Of course I'll keep PCA working
> as long as somebody is still using it.
>
> Finally, let me state that I'm pretty proud of what PCA turned out over
> the years - it has saved numerous sysadmins around the world uncountable
> hours of work and frustration. This compensates for all the time I
> invested, even if it was frustrating now and then when performing
> complicated tests to ensure PCA's analysis being correct or hunting for
> obscure bugs. Would I publish PCA 1.0 once again if I could go back to
> 2003? I think so :-) If only for the amount of positive feedback I got over
> all the years.
>
> Let me end with a quotation which is the basis of my work on PCA (and also
> in general):
>
> "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when
> there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
>
>
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