Patch Management in Solaris Comparisons

Solaris patches are installed and handled differently than Linux components. An inventory comparison will result in patch comparisons only if the selected inventories have identical software components.

If patches are compared and differences found:

• If the only actions to take on patches are to install them on the target, you may continue the job; return to Step 3.

• If there is at least one patch which should be uninstalled from the target, you should understand implicit patch installations before continuing with the job.

  For example, patch *-05 is installed on a Solaris machine. It is upgraded to patch *-20. All of the patches between 05 and 20 are implicitly installed. They are not on the machine, but the machine is affected as though they were. If you uninstall 20, you lose those effects and go back to 05; but according to what you have seen, you might believe that 19 should be on the machine.

  To handle implicit patch installations, Sun Update Connection – Enterprise will first uninstall the patch that was not in the source and then install a comparable patch seen on the inventory of the source.

  You see the following in the Run Job window:

  Maintain target’s patches -> Profile Data ->Install patch

Troubleshooting Clone Inventory Jobs

• Cannot Create Solaris Patch Job

  • Situation – The job cannot be created because there are conflicts in patch management actions.

  • Error – Cannot create job due to patch conflicts.

  • Explanation – One Solaris patch can affect multiple software. In one job, you could see tasks to both install the patch for one software and uninstall the same patch for another software. This job cannot be done through the Compare Inventory feature.

• Job Too Big

  • Situation – If the job contains too many actions, the following message is displayed

  • Error – The job exceeds the recommended size of 20 tasks. Do you want to continue?

  • Explanation – For every action that is sent as part of a job, more actions are added, to automatically handle dependency issues. If a job contains too many actions, there is a larger possibility that the job will fail on timeout.

  • Solution – You can click Continue and try to run the job as is. Or, you can break up the job into smaller ones:

    1. Click Cancel and then delete some of the actions from the panel.

    2. Click Make Target like Source again and run the job.

    3. Create a job to run the remaining actions.

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    Note –

    You can change the default minimum of 20 actions in the Preferences window (see Console Preferences – Jobs).

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• No Tasks for Job

  • Situation – The job cannot be created because there are no actions, even if the comparison did find some differences.

  • Explanation – Some differences in inventory will not be translated into actions.

    These are the following:

    • Uninstall Local files

    • Install Local Unrecognized files

    • Change hardware support components

  • Solution – Rerun the comparison filter. If such components are the only differences between the two inventories, they are actually already very similar.

    If you still want to make the managed hosts duplicates of each other, select the Difference between inventories radio button, take note of the list of differences, and create separate jobs to complete the cloning.

• Cannot Locate Software Component

  • Situation – The job cannot be created because the components that you selected cannot be located.

  • Error – Cannot locate the following components.

    Make sure they are added to the Local Components tree.

  • Explanation – The components that you selected are known because the SDS added them to the knowledge base. However, the software component itself was not uploaded, or was removed from the local machines. Therefore, there is no available software to be installed.

  • Solution – To add the software component to the knowledge base:

    1. Log into the console as an user with full permissions or as admin.

    2. From the Components list, select Local/Local RPMs or Local/Local PKGs and then click Attach.

    3. In the Attach Target File window, browse to the managed host and path where the software component is stored and then click OK.