patching

[Peter S Martinez]

What's the difference between applying the latest Support Plus disk and running a patch assesment and applying the patches?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

The patch assessment looks at your system as it actually is and decides what patches should be applied --- including those which might not be on the latest Support Plus disk. In general, you are going to find that installing the Support Plus pack is good enough although you should always pay attention to the security alerts and the patch notifications --- especially those which talk about possible data corruption. After doing UNIX for many years, I will categorically state that those who subscribe to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach are dump. First of all, how do you know it ain't broke.

If you have a sandbox, that is an excellent platform on which to deploy patches and then migrate them to test and production.