Analyzing Your System

Before you can apply patches to your system, you can determine which patches are needed. You can use Patch Manager to perform a patch analysis of your system to obtain a list of appropriate patches.

Patch Manager uses analysis modules and a list of available patches from the source of patches, which is the SunSolve Online web site by default, to perform the analysis of your Solaris system. For information about the source of patches, see Specifying the Source of Patches.

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

Sometimes a patch depends on another patch, that is, the first patch cannot be applied to the system until the other patch is applied. The first patch is said to have a dependency on the second patch. When Patch Manager analyzes your system, it checks for patch dependencies and automatically includes all patches in the resulting list. If you request a system analysis based on particular patches, Patch Manager adds any patches to the list that are needed to resolve patch dependencies.

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