swa & Installed Product Database

[Russell W. Roth]

HP-UX 11.23 on virtual partition on a rp7420: I ran swa report last week; downloaded patches earler this week; installed patches; from what I can see in the logs everything that was supposed to install - not already installed - got installed; ran swa report again - much shorter now - but still a handful of new patches; OK - select, download, install, re-run swa report - same patches show up again. I run "swlist -l product PHXX-YYYYY" for several, and they show present on the server. One does not appear present. I run "swverify" on it - it shows on the display, but not when I run swlist again - doesn't say it is not there - just returns the prompt. Question 1: why doesn't it show? Question 2: why does swa recommend the same patches I just installed? Is this no big deal and I should just get on with my life? It would be nice to get a clean swa report, kind of a "pat on the back" for all my hard work, as in "You've done all you can, Admin, now go home and hoist a beer."

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Russell:

If a particular patch doesn't show in 'swlist' then it is probably superseded. Try using:

# swlist -x show_superseded_patches=true -l product

As for SWA recommending the same patches just installed, set the 'inventory_max_age=0' (it defaults to 24-hours). I use '-x inventory_max_age=0' in my '.swa.conf' file for this reason.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bob E Campbell]

I have a pretty good idea what is going on here...

My guess is that you are including the CRIT analyzer looking for critical patches. It turns out that will include a number of firmware patches. These patches were built to always try to install but to deselect themselves if the system is not the correct hardware.

Take a look at the detail section of the HTML report (~/.swa/report/swa_report.html). It will have links and information that will confirm that they are firmware related. If this is the case the details will also include an issue ID that can be placed into the file ~/.swa/ignore to remove them from future consideration. The ignore file has a template that tries to describe its operation.

Firmware management is still a hot topic, but it is clear that we are moving away from SD-style patches to deliver it.

[Russell W. Roth]

Thank you both. I will look into these. Closing thread.

[Russell W. Roth]

That's more than enough to go on for now. I have three more servers to patch and I will use this information to customize those installs. I really appreciate they "why" this forum provides where man pages and pdf's usually only show the how.