Analyzing Your System

Before you apply updates to your system, you must determine which updates are needed. You can use Update Manager to perform a update analysis of your system to obtain a list of appropriate updates.

Update Manager uses analysis modules and a list of available updates to perform the analysis of your Solaris system. For information about the source of updates, see Specifying the Source of Updates.

Based on the result of the analysis, the updates can be downloaded and applied to your system.

Sometimes an update cannot be applied to the system until another update is applied. The first update is said to depend on the second update. When Update Manager analyzes your system, it checks for update dependencies and automatically includes all updates in the resulting list.

The list of updates that is generated by the analysis is based on all of the available updates from the Sun update server. No explicit information about your host system or its network configuration is transmitted to Sun. Only a request for the Sun update set is transmitted. The update set is scanned for updates that are appropriate for this host system, the results are displayed, and those updates are optionally downloaded.