Posts tagged with: patches

I think one of the best features of Solaris is the Live Upgrade mechanism. This really useful feature can be used for upgrading and patching with very little impact on the server. This means you can patch or upgrade your production system, whilst it's still in production, and only schedule a short outage for the reboot needed to activate the new patched/upgraded environment. Live upgrade also has the added benefit that you can roll back to a known good boot environment in the event something goes wrong. Sadly, it's not always a bed of roses when it comes to using live upgrade as things change with patches and new bugs are discovered and fixed, however most problems can be easily avoided with a little bit of pre-planning. Continue reading ►

I encountered a bit of a challenging question today... Suppose I have Solaris 10 1/06 (update 1) installed and I've patched it with various patches that are actually provided as part of a much later release, for example Solaris 10 11/06 (update 3). Will I have to reapply those patches if I perform a live upgrade to and intermediate version, eg Solaris 10 6/06 (update 2)? At first I thought: "No. The patches have been applied, the pkgs updated to reflect these patches and the upgrade tool should be able to workout that a later version of the pkg has already been applied". Patches are essentially partial pkgs after all, and there is version detection within the patching and packaging. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it couldn't be that simple, especially considering that the Solaris patch, packaging, installation and upgrade systems are a bit of a mess under the hood (it's being sorted in Nevada/OpenSolaris). So I did some investigating. Continue reading ►