Patch Corner: Patch news and best practice

Sun Learning Services are in the process of creating a number of patch related training lessons.

They've launched a blog, which contains the initial introductory videos.

Future lessons will be much more detailed, concentrating for example on Live Upgrade.   These lessons will be available on the Sun Open Learning Center (SOLC) website: https://learning.sun.com/solc/smartstart.

My colleague, Enda O'Connor, has published 3 more patching articles on Big Admin which I hope you will find useful:

• Analyzing a patchadd or patchrm Failure in the Solaris OS

  How to gather and analyze the necessary information to determine why a 'patchadd' or 'patchrm' session failed.
  

• How to Split a Root Mirrored With Solaris Volume Manager Prior to Updating Software

  How to split a Solaris Volume Manager mirror prior to updating the software through upgrades or patches.

• How to Remove a Solaris Patch While Booted From a Network or CD-ROM

  How to run 'patchrm' from a network or CD-ROM against a non-live system that is mounted from such media, and how to mount file systems under the mount point after the system is booted from the media.

I think the first article is particularly useful to help customers and support engineers understand what data to gather to enable analysis of a patching issue.  Even if you are not able to analysis the issue yourself, providing this data to Sun Support when you log a call will help speed up the issue analysis by Sun.

My colleague, Enda O'Connor, has written another useful article on Big Admin about patching using Live Upgrade, restrictions, and how-to use Live Ugrade to upgrade/patch from Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 to Solaris 10.  See http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/live_upgrade_patch.jsp