swlist inconsistency

[Oscar Gatson]

Our customer has a concern that when a "swlist" is performed, the output is
not consistent from host to host.
Is this something of concern?

Most of the patches that are being output are not the same on each site,
this is one of the concerns. Also every site was upgraded using the same unix
patch bundle.

What needs to be done if anything?

[Denver Osborn]

I wouldnt be too concerened about it. If both boxes are relatively the same (as far as products and hw) and the same patch bundle was installed I'd be good to go. Some of what they see could be superseded patches installed. So a lot of the differences could be what was installed prior to the bundle.

For example you could see 2 libc cumulative patches on one host and 3 on another and they could still be at the same patch level.

[James R. Ferguson]

Oscar:

If swinstall has been used with the same options and patches have been applied in the same order, etc. then I would expect the same view from swlist for identical hardware. Swinstall operates intelligently if you choose "match_target=true". In this case, software selection is done by locating filesets on the source that match the target system's installed filesets.

...JRF...

[John Palmer]

You could also get inconsistencies if say one server had been upgraded from a previous version of HP-UX whereas another had not. Also the date when a server was installed would possibly influence the number of patches/bundles that have been installed.

If you have installed the same standard patch bundles on the servers then I wouldn't be too concerned about the inconsistencies.

[Tim Malnati]

Another big factor in patching is the installed applications in the machine. During the initial install of the machine there are lot of optional filesets that may or may not be installed. These could have been added later on also. The purchased applications could be entirely different as well. Do an 'swlist -a state -l fileset' to get a listing of everything on the machine and do a careful comparison of the non-patch filesets as well.

[Rick Garland]

Different machines do different tasks. When you patch a system, not only are you patching for the HW and the OS, you are also patching for the applications that run on that box. Does one machine use FC and another LAN? If so, you are going to have a different set of patches installed on each machine. There will be some that are the same but not all patches go for the FC and not all patches go for the LAN.

[Vince Inman]

swlist reports on the installed bundles,products,filesets that are on a system. If two systems are inconsistent with each other then there is a reason, such as inconsistent hardware. To a certain extent, two machine should be duplicates but only to a certain extent. If you can identify the differences between the two machines, you can probably account for the differences between the output of swlist. That is, provided that they were built as duplicates in the first place.

[Cheryl Griffin]

As mentioned, different hardware and the machine may have been built using different base level software.

The swlist output does not have to match.

If they are concerned with maintaining machines with different patch levels, this is really not an issue either since they can use the latest patch media and match what target has. The right patches for the machine, will be selected and installed.