topic Best Time toe patch the servers in Operating System - HP-UX

Best Time toe patch the servers

George Chechakunnil — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:15:57 GMT

Hello,

We are a shop with close to 150 HPUX systems, expect for 5 of them all are 11i servers.

We use the CPM method and create a bundle for each applciation group and then roll out to the production servers.

Considering the time HP releases the Patch bundles what you think is the best time to patch the servers, say if we plan to patch them twice year?

My thinking is April and October.. It usually takes us 3 months to finish all the servers..

Any suggestions are welcome

thanks
George Abraham

Re: Best Time toe patch the servers

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:36:58 GMT

Shalom,

The answer depends on use patterns.

We have a monthly window on a Tuesday night in which users must give us the systems.

Many people bury their patching in the middle of the weekend.

One of our big customers whom we assist on patching has a whole system for doing it and several months that are so important we can't patch systems with them.

So the answer is, it depends.

We do a relatively high number of servers at once with the following model:

1) Server has rlogin access to all other servers as root. It shares the patch depot on nfs.

while read -r list
do
rlogin server_name "swinstall -x autoreboot=true reinstall=false -s nfshost:/patchpath \*"
done

This can let you get a lot of servers done pretty quickly, and need not be sequential, you can background the rlogin. I recommend ssh to encrypt the credentials and data stream.

SEP

Re: Best Time toe patch the servers

George Chechakunnil — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:05:57 GMT

Eskerrik asko

We dont really have a problem with patching but my question is since we have to do twice a year, whats the best time to do it

April and March of every year(?) so we get the best of the bundles released by HP and have it tested.