AdminSuite and Patches

Support for automatically patching new diskless and AutoClient clients is now integrated into the AdminSuite and AutoClient tools. A command line interface, admclientpatch, is also provided to allow you to patch existing clients with one operation.

A small number of required patches for different releases of Solaris are shipped with the AdminSuite product. The appropriate patches will be applied as you create new clients. You can use the admclientpatch command to spool additional patches or you can remove patches from the spool area that you no longer need. However, you should be careful when removing one of the patches that is shipped with Solstice AutoClient 2.1 since new clients may not work properly if a required patch is missing.

Because patches are now applied automatically when a client is created, there are some additional things to be aware of. If you have existing clients, including dataless clients, that share the OS service with the new client, these existing clients will now also have the patch. You can use the admclientpatch command to be sure that all of the diskless and AutoClients also have the patch applied to their root filesystem. For dataless clients, you may need to go to each client and apply the patch to ensure that the dataless root is patched properly to match the shared OS service.

The disconnectable patch will also affect any dataless clients that use CacheFS(TM) and that share the OS service. The disconnectable patch will need to be applied to the dataless client's root for the client to work properly. The patches can be found in the spool area: /opt/SUNWadmd/Patches. The patch that needs to be applied to the dataless client root is shown in Table 2-2.

Slower Installations

Because of the integrated patching support that is now in the Host Management tools, adding AutoClients or diskless clients will take longer than in the previous release. This impact is due to the time needed to run installpatch for appropriate spooled patches. Once the client is created, there should be no noticeable performance difference from the earlier release.