HP-UX Patches cause problems?

[Ben_31]

Hi,

I have about 30 HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00 servers in various states of neglect. Some of them have not had an OS/firmware patch applied in years.

They are running, Remedy, Oracle, NetCool, HPOV, Veritas Volume Manager, Veritas File System, and Veritas NetBack, some custom C programs and Perl programs and some shell scripts.

I want to know if I start poping the latest update CD's in them and just install all needed patches if I am going to have problems?

Has anyone heard of old versions of Veritas/Oracle/Remedy/HPOV that suddenly quit after getting the latest patches applied?

_Ben.

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

Normally you wont land up into problems after installing the Patch CD. I have done it and things have worked fine for me.

You can try it on atleast one of the server. Are you facing any problems as of now ???

Piyush

[erics_1]

Ben,

I can't recall any specific problems. Typically, applying the patch bundle will introduce many enhancements onto your system. Of course, make sure you have the necessary recovery methods in place. Besides, you do have a backup kernel to boot off of in case you run into any problems.

Hope this Helps!
Eric

[Ben_31]

I just recently started at a new job. I have many years of experience working with many UX's, but not so much experience with machines that haven't been administrated in years. I have a scary feeling that trying to get these machines in shape is going to be like trying to excersice after sitting on the couch for a long time.

I don't have any problems now, but that is only because other than installing OpenSSH and Bash (depots from the HP SOftware Porting & Archive Center). And setting up a centralized Syslog DataBase

See http://www.umialumni.com/~ben/SYSLOG-DOC.html

Getting them all using NTPd, and fixing DNS and nsswitch on all the boxes. I haven't done much on the boxes at all.

My next steps will be trying to strip the inetd's and shutting down all the sysVinit stuff that nobody is using (like NFS and dtlogin).

Then I will be trying to install patches on the boxes.

Does anybody have a quick and dirty howto for process and user accounting on HP systems?

-Ben.