Chapter 4 Documentation Issues Regarding the Solaris Patch Management Tools

This chapter describes known documentation problems.

Solaris 9 smpatch(1M) Man Page Issues

The Solaris 9 smpatch(1M) man page is delivered as part of the Solaris 9 software in the /usr/share/man/sman1m directory. You can access this version of the man page by using the man command.

The following sections describe problems with the man page.

Incorrect Description of Role Usage

Description:

The sentence in the Description section about roles is incorrect. The sentence reads:

To run this command on multiple machines, you must first create a role on each machine that contains the necessary rights to perform patch management.

Workaround:

While you are permitted to use roles to run the smpatch on multiple systems, you can also grant these rights to an ordinary user. Or, you can run smpatch as superuser, who has all rights.

Incorrect Example of smpatch add -n

Description:

In Example 1, an extraneous slash (/) appears in the path of the smpatch command. The path name shown is /usr/sadm/bin//smpatch.

Workaround:

Remove the extra slash in the path name of the smpatch command so that it reads /usr/sadm/bin/smpatch.

Incorrect Example of smpatch add -x mlist

Description:

Example 3 incorrectly shows how to specify the patch list file.

/usr/sadm/bin/smpatch add -H myhost -p mypasswd -u root -- \ -x mlist=/tmp/patch/patch_file \ -x mlist=/tmp/patch/machine_file

Workaround:

Change the first instance of mlist to idlist. The example command line should be as follows:

/usr/sadm/bin/smpatch add -H myhost -p mypasswd -u root -- \ -x idlist=/tmp/patch/patch_file \ -x mlist=/tmp/patch/machine_file