Removing un-needed patches

[Tony Williams]

I have several CSS systems and we patch them quarterly per HP specification. Each patch update generally consists of 200+ patches and 250 MB+ in consumed disk space. While I do keep my standard HP-UX filesystems large, /usr, /opt, and /var are over 1000MB we still have filled up /var due to the patch installs. The patch cleanup utility from HP works great on 10.20 servers but does not work on 11.00 servers which is what I run on my CSS servers.

Does anyone know a safe and effective way of identifying and then removing unnecessay patches on HP-UX 11.00?

[James R. Ferguson]

Tony:

Install PHCO_22044 on 11.0. This will give you 'cleanup'. From the patchnotes...A new option, '-c', has been added to the cleanup(1M) utility to act as an interface to the 'swmodify -x patch_commit' command. This option allows a group of superseded patches to be committed based on the number of times they have been superseded on the system. The actual committing of the patches is still performed by the smwodify(1M) command, which is invoked by cleanup(1M).

...JRF...

[Tony Williams]

Thanks James,

I have that patch on my system, and I tried the -c option with the number 5 for the times patches were superceded, and it did not come up with any. Then I tried with the number 2 and it came up with 91 patches to commit. Given HP's desire to recall numberous patches how many times can a patch be superceded befor it can be committed?