The new PatchFinder tool is now available on http://sunsolve.sun.com/patchfinder/.
It's linked off the main SunSolve Patch page, http://sunsolve.sun.com/show.do?target=patchpage. Look for the following link immediately under the old PatchFinder search box:
The PatchFinder
Why a new PatchFinder tool ?
The old PatchFinder tool was a pet peeve of mine. You needed to know at least the 6 digit base PatchID of the patch you were trying to find in order to find it. Rather self defeating IMHO.
The new PatchFinder tool directly leverages Sun's internal Patch Metadata Web Services to provide a much richer search experience.
Features of the new PatchFinder tool
You can still search by PatchID if you want. This will override all other search options.
But you can also search for all Recommended or Security patches, and restrict that search, for example, to Solaris 10 SPARC.
By the way, "Recommended" means it's part of the Solaris Recommended Patch Cluster, which contains the latest revision of all Solaris OS patches which fix Security, Data Corruption, or System Availability issues. See the cluster inclusion criteria definitions by clicking the appropriate heading on the Patch Clusters & Patch Bundles download page, http://sunsolve.sun.com/show.do?target=patch-access.
"Security" includes all patches which address Security issues, including Solaris OS patches and application and middleware patches for other products.
If you click the "OS Patches Only" box, the search results can be restricted to patches for the Solaris OS only, which will exclude application and middleware patches which are not bundled as part of the Solaris OS.
Caveat: Note, the interpretation of what is a Solaris OS patch used by the tool is currently about 97% accurate. This is due to difficulties interpreting patches for applications and middleware which may be bundled with the Solaris OS. (The old PatchFinder tool and SunSolve patch reports have the same issue.) Hence you can see anomalies between search results returned for "Recommended" and "Recommended & OS Patches Only" which should be identical. A subsequent version will have a 100% accurate interpretation of what is a Solaris OS patch.
Advanced Search Capabilities
Click on "Show Advanced Search" for more options.
This gives you options such as searching by CR (Change Request, a.k.a. BugID) number, so if you suspect you've hit a particular bug, you can check whether a patch for that CR is available yet.
Or you can search for patches with particular words in the patch synopsis or keywords fields - e.g. ldap, "patch util", "package util", "pkg util", etc. These options have limited value as it's difficult to guess the values.
The "Released Before" option is handy if your company has a policy of waiting for patches to "age" a specified number of days after release before you consider applying them.
The "Released After" option is useful to restrict the search to patches released since the last time you checked for patches.
The "README Modified After" option is subtly different to the "Released After" field and is a superset of the "Released After" results in that is also shows patches whose README or patchinfo metadata files have been updated since the patch was initially released - for example, Special Install Instructions may have been added to the README to specify workarounds for issues found post-release which do not warrant the patch being withdrawn from SunSolve (i.e. the patch still does more good than harm for the majority of customers).
You can filter the search further to see only those patches whose README file was modified since you last downloaded patches by using the following search filter combination: For example, if you downloaded patches 30 days ago, you can see which patches which were release 30 or more days ago have had their READMEs modified since then by using the combination: "Released Before" == 30 && "README Modified After" == 30
In all of these time related fields, you can specify actual dates instead of a specified number of days.
If you don't have a support contract, click on the "Public Patches Only" box to restrict the search to patches which are available for download without a support contract.
The "Patch Property" field enables you to search for things like
"Interactive" patches which require manual intervention during
installation, "NonStandard" which means they aren't applied using the
standard 'patchadd' utility (e.g. firmware patches), or patches which
require downtime (Single User Mode, Reboot*) if applied to the live
boot environment. (Remember, Live Upgrade can be used to minimize the
downtime and risk associated with applying patches by applying the
patches to an inactive boot environment, thereby avoiding such downtime
requirements during or immediately after patch installation. You can
reboot to set the inactive boot environment live at a time that suits
you.)
By default, only patches which are currently
available for download (i.e. patches which haven't been withdrawn due
to issues) are returned in the search results. You can select
"Withdrawn" patches instead to get a list of patches which have been
withdrawn from SunSolve due to serious issues. This is useful to
ensure you don't have any withdrawn patches installed on your systems.
I recommend you also select "Show Obsoletes" along with "Withdrawn" so
withdrawn patches which have been superseded by replacement good
patches aren't masked. (Note, a Sun Alert is issued whenever a patch
is withdrawn, so if you keep abreast of Sun Alert notifications as is
advisable, this step is simply a check and balance.)
Fields such as "OS Release", "State", etc., allow multiple options to be selected concurrently from the drop down menu.
Patch Metrics Gathering
The new PatchFinder tool is also useful for helping you to calculate patch metrics - e.g. the number of Solaris 10 SPARC OS patches released in the last year.
Or, if you feel so inclined, you can use the new PatchFinder tool to calculate the percentage of Solaris OS patches which are publicly available. Select an OS Version, select "OS Patches only", and search with and without the "Public Patches Only" box selected to get the number of publicly available patches and the total number of available patches respectively. To save you the trouble, the percentage of Solaris OS patches which are publicly available without a support contract today (May 27th 2009) are 25% for Solaris 10 OS patches, 28% for Solaris 9 OS patches, and 31% for Solaris 8 OS patches.
Display and Bookmarking Options
You can also select the number of patches to display in each page of search results returned (default 20), hide the search form so that only the results are displayed (the option is in the top right hand corner of the tool), and order the results by PatchID, Released date, or Synopsis, in either ascending or descending order (by clicking on the appropriate column heading of the results returned).
You can click on a PatchID in the search results returned to display the Patch README.
You can also bookmark the search results returned for future reference. This is handy if you wish to run the same query regularly.
Help!
There's a "Help" summary in the top right hand corner and each search field has it's own help summary marked "?".
What's next ?
I hope you find this initial version of the new PatchFinder tool useful.
This is a start, not the finished article. In future versions we plan to provide options to resolve patch dependencies and patch installation order, enable patch download, etc.
Feedback - what else would you like to see ?
Feel free to provide feedback on features which you'd like to see to the software-update-finder-feedback@sun.com alias or directly to me, Gerry.Haskins@sun.com .
Our goal is to improve your patching experience.