Automatically Updating Your System With Patches

Patch Manager can automatically apply the set of appropriate patches to your system.

An update performs these steps in the patch management process:

• Analyzes your system to determine which patches are appropriate

• Downloads those patches to your system

• Applies only the patches that meet the policy for applying patches

After a patch has been successfully applied, the downloaded patch is removed from the download directory.

Patches are applied to your system depending on the specified policy and the patch properties associated with the patches that are downloaded.

If a patch does not meet the policy for applying patches, the patch is not applied. Instead, a patch entry for that patch is written to the disallowed_patch_list file in the download directory. Sun Patch Manager continues trying to apply the other patches. Later, you can go to the download directory and use the smpatch add command to manually apply any disallowed patches that are listed in this file. For any of the patches that have the interactive property set, follow the instructions in the patch's README file to apply them.

For example, you can bring your system to single-user mode and apply the patches listed in the disallowed_patch_list file by typing the following:

# smpatch add -x idlist=/var/sadm/spool/disallowed_patch_list

Instead of performing an update, you can perform the analyze, download, and apply tasks manually by using the smpatch command. These tasks are described in the following sections.