Patch depots in a mixed HP-UX environment

[Dave Johnson_1]

I have several 11.00 servers and one 11.11 v1. I have a depot for the 11.00 patches. I plan to create a new depot to hold 11.11 patches. It seems like a good practice to start, but is it really necessary? Following that lead, I would then create one for 11.11 v2? 11.23? Someday one for the various IA64 patches???? It would seem to be very easy to drop all the old patches/software once the 11.00 servers are removed from the company by just deleting the 11.00 depot.
Any comments on this are welcome. All will get points (some more than others).
-Dave

[Fabio Ettore]

Hi Dave,

I think it is a good practice.
Exist patches for HP-UX 11.X (hence 11.00, 11.11, 11.23) but there are patches for HP-UX 11.00 and also patches for HP-UX 11.11 and so on. So it wouldn't be necessary if you have a patch depot with patches for 11.X. But it is not absolutely good installing 11.00 patches on 11.11 systems or 11.23 (even if you can install them and I am not sure of that).

Conclusion: create and install patch depots separately accordong to the different releases of HP-UX 11.X.

HTH.

Best regards,
Fabio

[Rick Garland]

We have various depots based on the version of HPUX. It does keep the patches well organized and this becomes more important with those quarterly patch bundles.

We have 10.20, 11.00, 11.1, & 11.23. We use the same 11.23 depot for RISC and ia64 systems.

There are various utilities that are version independent, such as lsof or sudo. These are placed into their own depot as well.

[Armin Kunaschik]

I think it's better to seperate the OS versions, e.g. have a patch depot for 11.00, 11.11 and 11.23.
It might even be a good idea to have seperate depots for seperate patch bundles you get from HP.
You can then easily create/update Config bundles (man make_config) for network server installations via ignite.
This will reduce the overhead if you get new bundles and want to get rid of the old ones.

We have also seperate application depots for each OS version.

There is also a performance issue: Installations from large depots take longer if you use the default swinstall settings (autoselect_dependencies=true and autoselect_patches=true)

my 2 cents,
Armin

[Dave Johnson_1]

well I created a new deopt for the 11.11 stuff. Thanks for the info.
-Dave