HP Certified: HP-UX System Administration

The process of patch management is not very different from general software management. The same SD-UX utilities are used for installing, removing, and listing patches as are used for general software.

Obtaining Patches

HP-UX patches are distributed as shar files. When you download a patch from the Hewlett-Packard FTP or Web site, use the sh command to unshar it. For example, to download the patch, PHCO_15220 , you can use the following FTP process from the command line.

# ftp us-ffs.external.hp.com Connected to hpcc933.external.hp.com. 220- 220-Welcome to the HP Electronic Support Center ftp server 220------------------------------------------------------- 220- 220-You are user 53, and there is a limit of 200 simultaneous accesses. 220- 220-Log in as user "anonymous" (using your e-mail address as your password) 220-to retrieve available patches for HP-UX, MPE/iX, and other platforms. 220- 220-If you are a user of other HP ESC services, log in with your 220-HP ESC User ID and password to deposit or retrieve your files. 220- 220-If you have questions, send email to: 220- 220- support_feedback@us-ffs.external.hp.com 220- 220 hpcc933 FTP server (Version wu-2.4, HP ASL, w/CNS fixes (277) Wed Jun 24 18: 02:04 PDT 1998) ready. Name (us-ffs.external.hp.com:boota): anonymous 331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password. Password: 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> cd hp-ux_patches 250 CWD command successful. ftp> cd s700_800 250 CWD command successful. ftp> cd 11.X 250 CWD command successful. ftp> get PHCO_15220 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for PHCO_15220 (46784 bytes). 226 Transfer complete. 46784 bytes received in 1.04 seconds (44.02 Kbytes/s) ftp> quit 221 Goodbye. #

After downloading, use the following command to unshar the patch.

$ sh PHCO_15220 x - PHCO_15220.text x - PHCO_15220.depot [compressed] $

As you can see from the output of this command, two files are extracted from the package file. These files are always Patch_Name .text and Patch_Name .depot . The .text file is the patch description file and the .depot file is the actual patch in SD-UX depot format. The .text file contains the following information.

• Patch name

• Patch description

• Creation date: shows the date the patch was created

• Post date: shows the date when the patch was made public for general use

• Hardware platformsOS releases

• Products

• Filesets

• Automatic reboot: shows whether the system will be rebooted after the installation of patch

• Status: shows whether it is a general release or a special release

• Critical: shows if the patch fixes a critical problem. A critical problem is one that causes system failure, crash, hang, panic, application failure, data loss, or corruption

• Category tags

• Path name: shows the file path on the FTP site

• Symptoms

• Defect description

• SR: service request number, which is assigned to a formal request about the problem from a customer

• Patch files

• what(1) output: shows output of the what command for each file

• cksum(1) output: used to detect any errors in the file

• Patch conflicts

• Patch dependencies

• Hardware dependencies

• Other dependencies

• Supersedes

• Equivalent patches

• Installation instructions

Before installing a patch, you must read this information to find out its exact purpose.

Creating a Patch Depot

After you have unshared a patch, you can install it directly from the .depot file or you can add the .depot file to a patch depot on your system. I prefer the second option. To add the patch to the /var/spool/sw depot, use this command.

swcopy -s PHCO_15220.depot PHCO_15220 @ /var/spool/sw

Installing Patches

Patches can be installed with the help of the swinstall command. If you are using individual patches with the above-mentioned procedure, you can use the following command to get a list of software and patches from your default depot.

swinstall -s /var/spool/sw

When you use this command and the patches are present in this depot, you will see a list of all patches in the swinstall window. After making a selection in the usual way, you can install the desired patches.

If you have the patch CD-ROM from Hewlett-Packard and are not sure which patches to install, adopt the following process.

• Insert the CD-ROM in the drive.

• For HP-UX 10.20 and earlier, mount the CD-ROM on the /SD_CDROM directory using the mount command. Remember that, with HP-UX 11.00 and later, the CD-ROM is automatically mounted by swinstall .

• Start swinstall .

• Go to the Actions menu and select Match what target has on HP-UX 10.x or Manage patch selection on HP-UX 11.00.

• Go to the Actions menu and select Install (analyze). . . to start the installation.

Removing Patches

Package removal is similar to general software removal. It is done with the help of the swremove command.