[geeks] Suprise - ext. USB HD "Just Worked" under Solaris 10

[velociraptor]

On 11/6/06, Sandwich Maker <adh at an.bradford.ma.us> wrote:
> " From: velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com>
> "
> "
> " If you are working for a paranoid organization or one that needs to
> " save bandwidth, and have contract support, you can get a patch server
> " proxy software from Sun so that you can download updates to a central
> " repository in your own organization.  This also allows you to keep
> " your boxes at the same patch revision in the case where it would take
> " you longer than 2 weeks to patch everything.  (Sun releases patches
> " 2x/month, iirc.)
>
> their policy has changed in at least some respects.  they now update
> the patchdiag.xref -daily-, and while i run my patch check only on
> fridays it's unusual to go a week without at least one new patch.

I believe that those patches are only for security updates, though, correct?

> it would be trivial to automate remote execution of patchk and
> dopatch.  do i need sun's patch server proxy?

It would also probably be relatively trivial to figure out what
smpatch wants in terms of directory structures, and simply change your
internal DNS to point the Sun patch server entry to your local server.
  Or set up your script to mod the local host file, run smpatch, and
change the local host file back.

I just think for contracted clients, all this is a bit excessive in
terms of work when there are tools in the OS to do it already.  I mean
Sun signs their patches, and smpatch doesn't work with *unsigned*
patches.  Yet people happily download patches from RH with only MD5
sums. *shrug*

> btw when sun finally shut ftp off i tried to get patchpro working, but
> it was easier to rewrite my scripts with curl instead of ftp than try
> to figure out the necessary mojo.

Patchpro and smpatch are not the same thing.  The former requires SMC,
iirc, but the latter is simply a commandline tool that utilizes a
configuration file to fetch patches.

=Nadine=