Jim Laurent's Weblog

Solaris 10 is free for download and security patches are also free.  Additional patches, however, require a subscription or service contract from Sun.  The question frequently comes up on how to get the free security patches.  In the past, they were built into a bundle, however, I have this information from the Solaris sustaining engineering team.

The patch bundles at SunSolve.sun.com contain the recommended patches.
This includes security AND other non-security patches.
- The bundle of patches contains all the patches that fix the Sun Alert issues.
- The Sun Alert categories are defined as security + availability + data_loss
- This is stated in the README for the patch bundle

As the "other" non-security patches are NOT free, the whole bundle of patches
cannot be made free.

Note that as with patches themselves, the README for the bundle is free, just the
actual patches are NOT free.

But assuming that your customer has a service plan, he should be able to get this.

To see which patches are free in the Sol 10 SPARC set, you can go to:-

  http://sunsolve.sun.com/show.do?target=patches/zos-s10

But you need to view this when logged in as a regular user without a contract.
Then it will show you a red key symbol next to each patch that is NOT free.

The security patches alone, do not appear in any bundle.
You must download any patch individually.
Or you can use PCA - a free non-Sun tool for patch management.

Sun advertises this free PCA tool located at http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/