[geeks] Solaris 10 patching...

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 1, 2008, at 22:51 , Bill Bradford wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 09:22:19PM -0400, Jonathan Katz wrote:
>> On Apr 1, 2008, at 8:06 PM, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>>> What's the best current method of getting Solaris patches?
>> IIRC, pprosvc -d
>
> pprosvc has been retired and you're now supposed to use smpatch.
>
> I didn't know about pprosvc until your email - I went to read the  
> man page
> and it says "use smpatch instead" - and this is on Sol9 even.

Yes, and both want you to use a GUI program to configure them, which  
is not an option for my headless Dell.  I think the GUI program also  
expects a paid account for some reason.

Doesn't matter, I found a script which fetches and installs all of the  
non-pay updates and it worked very well.  Took about 3 hours to catch  
up with patches since last August, but it was an easy process.

That's part of the problem with Solaris.  There are so many redundant  
and sometimes conflicting configuration and admin programs and files  
now.

Solaris is really nice in terms of features and finally seems to be  
running fast, but it is absolutely butt-ugly in terms of configuration.

Going from the squeaky clean and easy /etc/ of FreeBSD to Solaris is  
like trading carpeting for a floor covered in broken glass.

Of course, plenty of other UNIX are pretty ugly.  Sun seems to have  
gone through a whole lot of "let's try this way..." phases.

But... zones are really cool... and a definite improvement over  
jails.  Linux doesn't even have OS virtualization (it is coming real- 
soon-now) so it isn't an option.

I like the potential to be able to archive a zone and put it back  
after re-installing the OS, moving it to another machine, etc.

This is the first version of Solaris I have ever run that could  
approach the maximum speed of the install hard drives.

To save time, I ended up installing Blastwave, which seems nice but  
there is some redundancy with Sun's packages.  They explain why they  
do it and I agree, but it still sucks.

The BSD systems stay much cleaner in that regard, by basically having  
a package system that everyone uses, and keeping their base system  
clean.

I was going to use sunfreeware.org, but it didn't have everything I  
wanted, and used /usr/local/ a lot and I rather keep that for my own  
stuff.

Anyone have long-term experience with Blastwave?

One big question right now is how well Blastwave packages integrate  
with zones.  I've not even looked into it yet.

Another thing that would be really nice is a "Absolute Solaris" book,  
done like "Absolute FreeBSD", or something like that.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com