Installing Maintenance Updates and Service Packs
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This section provides the following topics:
To help you start using Smart Update right away, the Smart Update documentation provides a set of quick-reference aids, short documents to which you can refer while using Smart Update. The aids include three procedures for basic Smart Update tasks, a glossary of icons and terms for graphical interface users, and a cheat sheet of command-line options for command-line interface users. All four documents are available for download in PDF format. Table 1-1 describes the quick-reference aids and provides links to them.
All quick reference aids are available in both HTML format, for online use, and PDF format, for download. To download a quick-reference aid in PDF format:
Procedure for downloading and applying a private patch created for you by BEA Customer Support. The procedure is available at:
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Procedure for creating a maintenance snapshot, a simple text file containing detailed information about the maintenance level of your BEA product installation. This file is requested by BEA Customer Support whenever you contact them for assistance. The procedure is available at:
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Procedure for creating a custom patch profile, which you use if you need to point an individual domain or one or more servers at patches that are not intended to be in effect for all servers that run on the BEA product installation. The procedure is available at:
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Definitions of the icons and labels used in the Smart Update graphical interface, available at:
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Cheat sheet for the
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Smart Update is a standalone Java application that you can run independently of BEA software to upgrade your software installations quickly and easily with maintenance patches and service packs. When you install a BEA product for the first time, Smart Update is automatically installed in your BEA Home directory.
The following sections summarize the main features of the Smart Update program:
Smart Update delivers a set of robust features that simplify the process of installing, or applying, maintenance patches to your BEA product installations:
When you start Smart Update, you are prompted to log in to BEA Customer Support using your BEA Support ID and password. (Obtaining a BEA Support ID is explained in Obtaining a BEA Account and Accessing Your Contract Entitlement.) After logging in, you can access private as well as publicly available patches:
BEA frequently bundles multiple patches into a single patch set, which simplifies the process of downloading and applying a related set of patches, and also helps ensure that the patches within each set are applied and managed in the proper sequence.
Each patch created by BEA for a particular maintenance level of a BEA product is validated against all existing patches for that maintenance level. When you run Smart Update to view and download patches, you automatically leverage the validation data provided by BEA Customer Support to eliminate the chances of applying a patch with a known conflict with any other patch that has been properly applied to your BEA product installation.
For example, when you attempt to apply one patch that depends on another that has not been applied, Smart Update notifies you of the dependency. You can then download the prerequisite patch and apply it before proceeding. Patch validation is performed automatically whenever you apply a patch. You also have the option of requesting patch validation before downloading a patch.
Occasionally BEA Customer Support may provide a replacement for a patch, or invalidate a patch, that you have previously downloaded and applied. If this happens, the first time you log in after the replacement becomes available, or the patch has become invalidated, Smart Update automatically notifies you. The patch you previously downloaded or applied is then marked invalidated in the patch's listing in the Smart Update graphical interface. Information about obtaining the replacement patch, when available, is also provided.
A command-line interface to Smart Update allows you to apply patches and obtain information about patches that have been downloaded or applied. You can perform these functions directly, from the command line, or indirectly, by writing scripts that include Smart Update commands.
Note: The command-line interface does not include the capability to connect to BEA Customer Support.
Smart Update supports a model in which patches, which have been downloaded to a central location in an organization, can be distributed via script to machines in a production environment on which BEA products have been installed. This enables you to adapt Smart Update to your business practices that govern how maintenance updates are distributed and applied to machines, especially those in a production environment from which a direct connection to BEA Customer Support for downloading patches is not appropriate or possible.
Smart Update does not require each machine being updated to connect directly to BEA Customer Support to obtain and apply maintenance patches. When you run Smart Update, you can apply patches and patch sets that have been made available in other ways.
For example, if a network failure or other infrastructure outage prevents you connecting to BEA Customer Support, you can obtain and apply patches as follows:
Smart Update makes it easy to remove patches or patch sets that have been applied, enabling you to restore earlier maintenance levels accurately and reliably:
To support complex production environments, Smart Update allows you to point an individual domain or server at a patch or patch set that is not automatically in effect installation-wide; for example, a patch for the WebLogic system classpath that you want to use only in a single test domain. Using this feature is recommended if you have multiple BEA products installed in a given BEA Home directory, and your domains are based on specific BEA products. For example, if you have a domain that is based on AquaLogic Service Bus, you should scope any AquaLogic Service Bus classpath patches to only that domain. This way, servers in other domains that do not use AquaLogic Service Bus will not run with AquaLogic Service Bus classes in their classpath.
Smart Update provides convenient tools for viewing and installing service pack updates:
The Service Pack Update component of Smart Update opens a new window to display a list of BEA Home directories and product installation versions for which service pack updates are available for viewing or installation.
When you use the Service Pack Update component of Smart Update on machines that are connected to the Internet, a list of currently available service packs is automatically displayed.
Note: You can view this list without logging in to BEA Customer Support, but to install a service pack, you are required to log in.
If you need to downgrade a product installation to the previous service pack, Smart Update displays the names of each previously-issued service pack for the current product version. You then select the service pack release you want to downgrade to, and perform the downgrade.
BEA Customer Support provides publicly available patches, private patches, and Service Pack updates in accordance with the following policy:
For information about creating a BEA account, obtaining a BEA login ID and password, and linking your BEA login ID to a support contract, see Obtaining a BEA Account and Accessing Your Contract Entitlement.
Smart Update makes it easy to view and install maintenance patches for a target product installation. Smart Update also helps you organize patches by providing lists of both the patches available from BEA Customer Support and the patches that you have already downloaded and applied.
In the main Smart Update window you can display lists of patches on two tabs, the Get Patches tab and the Manage Patches tab:
Figure 1-1 illustrates the steps you must complete to download and apply patches to a target installation.
Figure 1-1 Applying Maintenance Patches
For information about using Smart Update to apply maintenance patches, see Downloading and Applying Patches.
The command-line interface to Smart Update is especially convenient if you need to maintain large numbers of distributed machines in a carefully controlled, reliable, and reproducible state. For example, suppose you are involved in the following business scenarios:
An example of using Smart Update's command-line interface to apply a specific set of patches to multiple machines consists of the following steps:
Note: The machine to which maintenance updates are downloaded from BEA Customer Support must have a target installation selected that matches the distributed target installations to be updated.
For an example of distributing maintenance to multiple BEA product installations in a production environment, see Best Practices for Distributing Maintenance Updates.
Under some circumstances, it not desirable or possible to establish a direct connection from a particular machine to BEA Customer Support. For example:
Smart Update supports a variety of methods for providing maintenance updates to such machines. Although Smart Update makes it easy to connect to BEA Customer Support as a means of obtaining patches, you are not required to get patches in this way. Smart Update also allows you to obtain patches from alternative sources, such as remotely mounted disks or removable media. By taking advantage of this flexibility, you can adapt Smart Update to your organization's IT practices and create a controlled, reliable, and reproducible process for maintaining your BEA product installations.
If your environment includes at least one machine from which you can log in to BEA Customer Support, you can obtain and distribute patches to all BEA product installations in your environment that are supported by Smart Update. There is, however, one prerequisite for the machine used to download patches: it must be able to select a target installation that matches the target installation on the other machines to which updates are subsequently made available.
Figure 1-2 illustrates an example of providing maintenance updates to machines that are not connected directly to BEA Customer Support.
Figure 1-2 Example of Patching a Machine that Cannot Connect to BEA Customer Support
For more information, see Providing Maintenance Patches to Systems that Cannot Connect to BEA Customer Support.
Smart Update includes a component called Service Pack Update, which you can use for downloading and installing service packs as they become available for a BEA product that you have installed. By using the Service Pack Update component to install a service pack, you retrieve, from BEA Customer Support, only the code and media archives needed for the components currently installed. This customized retrieval optimizes the size of the archive, which makes the download process more efficient.
When installing a service pack, Smart Update creates a backup of the current installation. You can use this backup to restore system state if you need to roll back a service pack update.
Figure 1-3 summarizes the steps you must complete to install a service pack update.
Figure 1-3 Installing a Service Pack
For information about using Smart Update to download and install service packs, see Downloading and Installing Service Packs.
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