Looking for "patch administration" tools

[Alhassani Heller Kra]

Does anyone know any tools from HP or other sources, to managage patches for a big number of servers. Possibly some kind of patch level database, and/or a couple of scripts to get patch infos of which is installed on which system and what is required for which system component or application a.s.o

[Rick Garland]

Creation of depots will help in the manner. With each patch that is un shared, there is a corresponding text file that details what the patch is fixing or adding.

[Steve Sauve]

swlist will let you know what is installed on a box.

Hope this helps,
Steve

[Victor BERRIDGE]

a software depot on an exported nfs file system is what I use
Regards
Victor

[Stefan Farrelly]

Your looking for a higher level tool like Operations Centre, but this will only give you a graphical representation of each server and by selecting a server you have the option to list its installed software (which just does a remote swlist) or with the SD push agent you can select a source app/patch and by dragging and dropping install it onto a server. But I havent seen a tool which keeps a central database of patches of remote servers, you will have to do this yourself using scripts and a spreadsheet or something similar.

[Antoanetta Naghiu]

For installing in more than one server, you can use a installation server as is Ignite installation server. SD-UX can do that. To maintaine after... it is a nice idea, but I guess you have to organize your own plan. Manually use of swlist, swinstall, swremove, eventually patch_commit.

Wait a sec. I know, HP has a program "collect.sh" but you have to pay for it and at that moment, I guess only HP persons will run it and analyse it internally. You'll be provided with the rezults of the analyse. I guess, they'll keep you updated for a period of time... My company did not pay for it, so... I have no more details. Try to speak with your HP Sale Rep.

[Bill Hassell]

The software depot is the key but NFS is not needed (or recommended). Use swcopy to add whatever patches are needed for all servers (using swcopy) to any large directory, then use swerg to register the depot. Test the registration with swlist -l depot and on another server, use swlist -l depot @ hostname_with_depot

Now you can install patches onto any system using the swinstall command line. The software source would be @ hostname_with_swdepot:/swdepot_mountpoint and you can select which patches you want or simply use * for the selection.

[G.E. van Beek]

Look at:

http://members.tripod.de/rose_swe/cfg/cfg.html

cfg2html.sh is a script that generates a system snapshot in html output. This makes it easy to manage systems and as a reference after a system crash.

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Thanks Bill for correcting me, I will follow your advice

Best regards
Victor (who might follow some admin course next year...)

[Tom Danzig]

Our site uses the "collect.sh" service from HP.

Once every 6 months, we run this script on each server and e-mail the results back to HP. They analyze what patches are installed and send back a tape for each server with the necessary patches for each.

Well worth the extra cost (although I don't know the figure).