Quality Pack

[Javier Ortiz Guajardo]

i have a server with HPUX 11.0 64 bit, i have never installed a QUALITY PACK QPK1100 and i have some questions.

What advantages and disadvantages have the QPK110?

Can i install the last version of QPK110 or i need to do something else before install it?

What is the difference between the QPK110 and the assesment patch?

if i install the QPK110, can it affect to non hp application or software?

if you have somw links to read about it, i will appreciate so much?

Thanks

[Mel Burslan]

I am sure you will get a ton of responses and every each of them will have different opinions on them.

Here is mine :

You need to keep your HPUX OS uptodate via patching regularly. So, the advantage of installing a QPK is keeping your system up and stable, longer.

You usually do not need anything else prior to installing a QPK bundle. Which bundle to load is totally up to you and how conservative your company is when it comes to IT. In most places I have worked, we followed HP's release schedule 1 or 2 QPKs behind. As you know every new release has bugs in it and we want them to be ironed out before we put them on.

I am not sure what you mean by the assesment patch but if you mean bundling up your own patches depending on the system configuration, it is an alternative but if I were you I would apply the QPK first then do an assesment to see if I need more patches as each individual application may require a patch to keep stable.

As with anything else, patches can break running applications by fixing some bugs which may have been , although wrongly, utilized by some hot shot non-hp developers. So you need to keep at least one or better 2 versions of patches in your archive to be able to roll back if such a problem is encountered. After all, we are supporting a business not "playing" with computers.

Reading ? Well, I am not much of a help for this but if you do clever searches on these boards, I am sure you will fina a lot of discussions about the very same subject as you are not the first one facing the patching monstrocity.

Good luck

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

You can simply install the Quality Pack and you don't need to install anything prior to it. That's a cumulative bundle of patches upto that release. They fix security alerts, enhancements, bug fixes etc., so I would like to be reasonably up-to-date on my patch levels. I would prefer to go with conservative approach. Means I would like to install the latest but one release or wait for atleast couple of months. Also consider updating your OnlineDiag bundles.

It is a good practice to prepare ignite tapes|images before and after the installations.

-Sri

[Jeff_Traigle]

In theory, it's great to apply every QPK as they come out. In reality, it just doesn't make sense frm a practical standpoint in some cases. A couple of examples:

1. In my previous job, we were still running HP-UX 10.20 with Oracle RDBMS 7.2.3 and 7.3.4 and a home-grown app that we hadn't paid a software developer to maintain in equally as long (none of which has been support by either vendor in years, of course). Trying to be the good little admin that I was, I kept up the patches up-to-date until a couple og things happened... a.) updating the X11 libraries did weird things to the window sizes on the Xterminals, making the application unusable (this was just poor programming since not all of the windows did this in the application) and b.) one of the updates broke Oracle RDBMS 7.2.3 so the database wouldn't start.

2. My current situation finds me in a place where, over the years, developers have had primary control of what gets implemented on production systems. Permissions and setuid have been liberally changed throughout the system in ways that should never ever be done. Unfortunately, there application depends on these massive changes and any patches that would touch these modified settings can't be blindly applied. (And since there's no profit in fixing the application the way it should have been done from the beginning, these bad modifications are allowed to remain.)

So, I guess what I'm trying to say in a nutshell is this... if you're fortunate enough to work in a well administered environment where the admins have control and software is maintained and kept updated to supported revisions, then applying QPKs is a lot easier and less risky than it otherwise can be.