Thursday July 21, 2005
Thursday July 21, 2005 It has to be said that over the last few years I haven't had much need to practice my system administration skills. It's just too easy when your primary system is a SunRay. All I've really had to do is upgrade my laptop to the latest Solaris release and then add occasional bits and pieces of software. I've never patched my laptop (which is running Solaris) even though I know that's really not a clever thing to do, I could never seem to find the time.
Interestingly enough, if my laptop was running any OS other than Solaris, I'd have been happily patching it regularly, it just seemed to do fine on it's own. This alos seems to be the view shared by many Sun customers, I can't tell you how many times I've spoken to customers who say they still have isloated instances of Solaris 2.4 and 2.5 (or earlier) running somewhere in their environment because "it just works".
Just before the break one of my colleagues pointed me to the Sun Update Connection System Edition Preview, which I installed and have been quite happily using since. While I can't say it makes me a better administrator overall, it certainly makes keeping my system up to date very simple. For the first time in literally years I have a laptop with a completely up-to-date version of Solaris running on it and not only that, I now have the ability to update my other Solaris systems remotely. Will there be no end to my productivity?
I've been primarily using the GUI and have it set up to let me know when updates are available, however, I don't let it automatically install anything. I still want to have some hand in the process but if it keeps working the way it has been recently, I may well set it on fully automatic for at least security patches. Overall I've been very satisfied and from what I hear, most of the other folks trying it seem to agree.
Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/chrisra/entry/when_bad_administrators_turn_good
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Posted by fdasfdsa on October 12, 2006 at 07:31 PM PDT #