Posts tagged with: patching

Links of interest for 20 May 2010 - 30 Jun 2010: Sun’s Lost Intel-Chip Killer - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - So that's why Sun bought Montalvo. Somehow I don't think Sun would have been able to make the return on these had they come to market, but nice to know Sun's untold ambitions are coming to light. LCA: How to destroy your community [LWN.net] - Oh how true. Why the Digital Economy Act simply won't work - I think Cory Doctorow sums it up beautifully at the end... "Once you swallow a spider to catch a fly, you're on... Continue reading ►

If you think Solaris patching is a complete nightmare, have a bit of spare time on your hands (don't worry, you can still check emails etc) and really want to get up speed on Sun's best practices for patching on Solaris 10, then check out the FREE Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices (WS-2700-S10) training course. It's a little on the cheesy side and uses some pretty poor Second Life like images, but it provides some useful information on how to make your patching experience considerably easier. The main emphasis is on using Live Upgrade for all your patching and maintenance ... Continue reading ►

It's with great delight I read that the Solaris 10 Recommended and SunAlert patch clusters have been improved. Ed Clark has sat down and finally improved the install_cluster script, now called installcluster, and the cleaned up the directory structure. The whole build and verification process has been improved too. The improvements are quite significant and well detailed, so I'll just summarize the improvements: Continue reading ►

As promised on Friday, I've taken the plunge and tested applying the latest patch cluster to a fresh Solaris 10u5 installation running 10 zones using the new zones parallel patching feature. To speed things up and to try and prevent any problems I performed the following steps: Jumpstarted the OS (SUNWCuser cluster) Applied patches 125555-04 and 119254-66 (gives us the parallel functionality) Created a basic sparse-root zone without any networking Cloned the zone 9 more times Create an alternate BE using live upgrade so I had two identical boot environments Once I had the machine setup, I booted into single user mode (so all zones will be in the "installed" state) and set off the first cluster installation using the default options (ie no parallel application). I then rebooted into single user mode on the alternate boot environment, set num_proc to 10 and applied the patch cluster again. How's this for a significant difference in time: Continue reading ►

If you're running a fair few non-global zones on Solaris 10, you'll know full well how painfully slow the patching process is. Well, I'm please to say "not any more". The Zones Parallel Patching feature was officially released on Tuesday and is contained in the latest Solaris 10 patch utilities patch, 119254-66 (SPARC) and 119255-66 (x86). Getting the functionality is simple: just apply the patch as you would any other patch. Taking advantage of it is a different thing. By default the behaviour is as before: NO parallel patching takes place. But it's easily changed by setting "num_proc" to the number of non-global zones to be patched in parallel in the /etc/patch/pdo.conf file. Prior to this feature, each non-global zone was patched sequentially. With this feature invoked, the global zone continues to be patched first, but then the non-global zones can be patched in parallel, leading to significant performance gains in patching operations on zones systems. While the performance gain is dependent on a number of factors, including the number of non-global zones, the number of on-line CPUs, the speed of the system, the I/O configuration of the system, etc., a significant performance gain (up to 300% has been reported) can be expected for patching the non-global zones. Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 12 May 2009 - 1 Jun 2009: Sun Security Toolkit at OpenSolaris.org - The SST (aka JASS) is now open source (under CDDL) and available for OpenSolaris too. Parallel Patching for Solaris 10 - Chris Armes's Weblog - This is a godsend if you've got a system with a lot of zones that needs patching. You can expect patch for patchadd for this sometime in June so you can get parallel patching before S10u8 What's New in OpenSolaris 2009.06 - The presentation slides used by Peter Dennis at Community One Sun seeks to build world's biggest... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 25 Mar 2009 - 2 Apr 2009: Toshiba OpenSolaris Laptops - You can now get your hands on the much touted Opensolaris Toshiba laptops. Sadly, it#039;s US only at the mo with UK availability expected sometime in May 2009. I guess I#039;ll have to wait a bit, but it#039;ll be good to start hearing the reviews to see how these things run. Accelerated Patching of Zoned Systems - Woohooo!!!! Patching of systems with zones is about to get a lot quicker. Jeff provides some good data here just to whet your appetite in anticipation of the... Continue reading ►