Managing Updates with Update Manager and smpatch
Introduction
As I love Debian and some of my servers are running on Solaris, I had to get in touch with Solaris update solutions. They have a GUI called Solaris Update Manager and the CLI version called smpatch.
As it is on servers, I don’t have a graphical interface and I need to run updates with command lines. That’s what I’ll specifically talk about in this documentation. List of interesting binaries:
- pprosetup: Used to set the rules for downloading and applying patches.
- pprosvc: The automation service program for Patch Manager.
- smpatch: Used to actually download, apply, and remove the patches specified on the command line.
Update Manager
Just to give you a quick idea, when you have a graphical interface, it looks like this:
I won’t explain how it works as it is very simple.
smpatch
smpatch is the command line version of Update Manager.
Configuration
Set proxy settings
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Now set password by prompt:
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Configuration files
Here are the configuration files:
- System defaults:
/var/sadm/install/admin/default
- PatchPro defaults:
/etc/opt/SUNWppro/etc/patchpro.conf
/opt/SUNWppro/lib/.proxypw
- SunSolve Account Options
/etc/patch/patch.conf
/etc/patch/secret.conf
Analyze
The analyze will check what needs to be updated on your server:
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Upgrade
Now you want to upgrade. You have 2 choices:
- Automatic update: will check what is needed and will upgrade your system as well
- Manual update: you’ll need to download them and install them afterward
Automatic
The automatic update will do everything on its own (download + install):
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That’s all. It will tell you if it’s necessary to reboot or not.
Manual
For the manual upgrade, you’ll need first to download updates:
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And then install them:
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Default storage location
By default, updates are stored in this folder /var/sadm/spool/
. Updates are in .jar format:
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References
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=579
http://docs.huihoo.com/opensolaris/system-administration-guide-basic-administration/html/ch22s06.html
http://bob.vancleef.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=56
http://www.sun.com/service/sunupdate/flash_content.html
Last updated 21 Nov 2009, 07:11 +0200.