Guidelines for AutoClient Patch Administration

The general procedure for maintaining patches on AutoClient systems is as follows:

• Use admclientpatch -a or -r to create or update a spool directory of all appropriate patches on the local machine.

• On any client server, use admclientpatch -s to synchronize those patches installed on clients with those patches in the spool directory.

This general procedure for maintaining patches assumes the OS server (that is, the server providing OS services to clients) is the same system with the patch spool directory. If, however, your site has several OS servers for your AutoClient systems, you may want to use a single file server for the patch spool directory, and then mount that directory on the OS servers.

If this is the way you choose to configure your site, you will have to do all updates to the patch spool directory directly on the file server. (You can't successfully run admclientpatch -a or -r from one of the OS servers if the patch spool directory is shared read-only.) When mounting the patch spool directory from a single file server, the general procedure for maintaining patches on AutoClient systems is as follows:

• On the file server, use admclientpatch -a or -r to update a spool directory of all appropriate patches on the file server.

• On all OS servers that mount the patch directory from the file server, use admclientpatch -s.

Do not manually add or remove patches from the spool directory. Instead use the admclientpatch command for all of your patch administration tasks.