Applying patches

[George Abraham_1]

hi admins

I do dial up to the HP server. what will happen if i get disconnected and the session gets closed while appling Critical patches, like Hardware Extention patches or Gold Quality patches?..will the system go to a unstable situation?

thanks in advance

[Seb_4 · Accepted solution]

Georges,

It is not recommended to install patches through a dialup the obvious reason is possible disconnect.

A workaround would be to copy the patches locally and then install them. The time it will take to download the patches will be well payed off.

If however you do not have a choice, and eventually get disconnected while applying the patch swinstall will error out and you should be able to resume.

No changes are made to the system until you reboot.

Regards,
Seb

[John Dvorchak]

Seb is absolutly correct, but what I do when faced with the situation of doing critical task on dial up, or when I want to start a long job and don't want to stick around for the finish, I use VNC. VNC is a freeware product that actually starts up an X session on the remote system as the person that issued the vncserver command. Then there is a client part that works very well with M$Windows that allows you to connect to that already running session and perform tasks. It is a regular CDE session. If you disconnect or just quite the client part, the session continues to run.

I have been using it for about a year now and don't know how I got by without it.

You can see it at:
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

Also a google search should find the HPUX binaries with no problem. Do a search on here for VNC and the link may just show up.

Good Luck.

[Bill Hassell]

The answer is: yes, the system can occasionally become unstable, or certainly have incorrectly configured patches or pactch dependencies. There are so many ways to connect to a remote system (simple modem, VPN service, ssh, telnet, connect to GSP port, Xwindows, etc) that a disconnect is always a possibility through any dialup or network connection. Therefore, always run swinstall as a protected background process as in:

nohup swinstall -x -s > /var/tmp/install.log 2>&1

Then use tail -f /var/tmp/install.log to monitor the progress for a while (CTRL-c to terminate the tail command). And just to make sure all is going well, disconnect, then reconnect and see if the swinstall process is still running and check the log again.

By using the batch method (rather than the Xwindow GUI) you don't need a high speed connection (a 2400 baud modem will be adequate).