[rescue] Sun wants money for patch bundles?

[Ahmed Ewing]

On 4/13/07, Sandwich Maker <adh at an.bradford.ma.us> wrote:
> " From: Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net>
> "
> " You can register a (free) sunsolve account to get recommended/security
> " patches.  Other stuff requires a contract.
>
> has anyone here gotten their getsolpatch.sh to work?  i've long had a
> free sunsolve account and i can d/l patches interactively, but i've
> been trying to get sun to move on scripted patch access ever since
> patches.sun.com was shut off, and all they can say is they're waiting
> to hear back from their back team.

It works for me *most* of the time (I am a contract holder though). I
am using it to get RPC clusters only, not unbundled patches.

My only complaint is that a considerable amount of wget download
attempts (perhaps 1 of every 4, if charted over time) ends up failing
due to timeout before a single byte of the file is sent. This happens
very haphazardly--sometimes I'll have no problem getting 7_Recommended
and 8_Recommended, but 9_Recommended fails before 10_Recommended
succeeds. Other times all succeed; still other times, all but one
fails. While ~25% is not a negligible amount of occurrences, this
still wouldn't be a problem if the existing *_Recommended.zip file
didn't get overwritten with a corrupted, empty copy upon transmission
failure.

My current scripted workaround is pretty straightforward: first copy
the existing valid RPCs to a temporary subdirectory of the patch
download directory, then invoke getsolpatch.sh. After the patch-list
is processed, each newly downloaded RPC is tested first for zero
length and then for non-zero exit codes returned from unzip -t: If a
file is valid, the old counterpart is deleted from the subdirectory.
If it is corrupt, the old one is moved back up to the real patch
directory (I don't adamantly require an updated RPC every attempt--the
older releases' RPCs don't always change anyway).

That annoyance aside, it has worked fine for me and my needs.
Sometimes I do miss being able to quickly walk the SunSolve anon FTP
server's dir structure to get what I need manually while at a host's
CLI (I can't ever seem to remember the Sun URL for running wget)...
but otherwise it's been relatively painless.

Hope that helps,

-A