PatchPro Hub Help

Use this page to select which PatchPro method to use in determining your required patches. The methods are provided to allow you to balance convenience against privacy. There are web-based methods as well as patch automation clients you can download and install locally for performing scheduled routine analysis of your systems.

• PatchPro Interactive allows you to describe your specific configuration in detail and generate a custom patch list. The custom patch list is provided in installation order, that is to say, patches that depend upon other patches are listed after the patches upon which they depend. README files are provided. Patches may be downloaded one at a time or as a group.
• PatchPro Expert is a signed applet capable of analyzing your Solaris system running the Netscape(c) web browser. It requires the user to permit the applet to execute commands, read and write your filesystem (as you) and read and write back to Sun's patch site at SunSolve in order to retrieve the needed patches. Several dialogs will pop up asking you to grant the applet permission to do these things.

  PatchPro Expert needs to execute the following benign commands:

  • uname -r
  • pkginfo -l
  • showrev -p
  It will also help you create and store a file which includes information about storage devices on this system that are of interest to you. The applet will read this file to find out what disk arrays, tape subsystems and other hardware are in use on this system.

  No information about your system is transmitted off of your site. Instead a database with all of the available Sun patches is downloaded to the applet which compares the available patches against your current configuration. The applet will then generate and display a patch list from which you may choose to download one or more of the recommended patches.

  Performance Issues Since this applet executes a set of fairly disk intensive commands in order to determine what software is installed on your system, it may appear that the applet is unresponsive for 30 seconds to a minute at a time. This is a problem related to the Netscape version of Java and will improve with newer improved versions of the browser.

• PatchManager 2.0 is a 100% Java client that can be run on a Solaris system to acquire and install patches required for that system. It is available for Solaris 8 and Solaris 9. It is delivered as a part of Solaris 10. It is intended primarily for attended operation but it can be scheduled using the cron command for scheduled unattended operation.
• PatchPro 2.2 is a 100% Java client that can be run on a Solaris system to acquire and install patches required for that system. It is available for Solaris 2.6 through Solaris 9. It is intended primarily for scheduled unattended monthly downloads but it also provides a command line interface for interactive operation.