/var/adm/sw/patch

[Jim Thrash]

I recently was given the responsibility of administering an HP L Class server and an old HP model 712 workstation both running HP-UX 11.0. I have some patches that I need to apply however neither of these systems have the /var/adm/sw/patch directory and the files one would expect to find in this directory. Is there another directory that I should use? Or maybe the directory was accidently removed some time ago? Any ideas?

[Patrick Wallek]

/var/adm/sw/patch doesn't exist?!? Oh boy.

Have any patches EVER been installed on these machines? What happens if you do an swlist? How about 'swlist -l product | grep PH'?

Do you have any backups of these machines? Do those directories exist on the backups?

I guess if all else fails you can try creating the /var/adm/sw/patch directory and try installing your patches. I don't have much confidence in that working though.

I would say restoring from backup, if available, would be your best bet.

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hello,

It is not neccessary to have /var/adm/sw/patch directory to install patches. If you are installing patch from a media then just select source as cdrom or if you have patch bundle in a local directory then select local directory while running swinstall.

-Good luck,
-USA..

[Mike Hassell]

Jim,

Chances are whoever was administrating these boxes before you, removed this directory to save space in /var. This directory doesn't contain acutal patches, but rathter the uninstall information for the patches that are installed.

You MUST keep '/var/adm/sw' directory as the Software Distributor requires this directory to function properly.

What does your '/var' directory currently look like? Please post an output of:

bdf /var

You may want to look into breaking /var into a few seperate mount points to meet the growth needs as /var is very important to all your applications.

If I were you, I would start by taking a detailed look at what '/var' currently looks like and ensure I had enough free space to work with. Then I would create the '/var/adm/sw/patch' directory and install the patches, leaving the newly created directories there, in the event that you need to remove any of these newly installed patches.

You may want to think about making each of the following a different mount point:

/var/adm
/var/adm/sw
/var/mail
/var/spool
/var/tmp

Depending on what each of these directories look like as it will make life easier when you need to expand if you have free disk space to do so.

Hope that helps.

-Mike

[Mike Hassell]

Jim,

I forgot to mention to checkout:

man cleanup

As I believe that this is the proper way to remove superseded patches from '/var/adm/sw/patch' to free up some disk space when '/var' is running tight.

-Mike

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

This directory needs to be there and I think that somebody might have accidently removed it. Find out if there are patches installed by

swlist -l product | grep PH*

If not then you need to install the patches.

happy patching time !!!

Piyush

[Pete Randall]

What are you guys talking about? None of my machines (including an 11i box that I just built, and patched, two weeks ago) have a /var/adm/sw/patch directory.

Confused,
Pete

[T G Manikandan]

Hello,
I assume that all the patches are commited and now it is located at
/var/adm/sw/save directory.


Thanks

[Martin Johnson]

I may be wrong, but I thought v11.0 saves the patch info in /var/adm/sw/save?

Marty

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Jim,

11.0 does not use /var/adm/sw/patch. Instead, /var/adm/sw/products is used.

/var/adm/sw/save is used to store filesets that are superseeded by patches. That's so they can be restored when you backout a patch. Once the patch is committed, the files in /var/adm/sw/save superseeded by the patch committed are removed.

To get a list of patches and their state, I use:
swlist -l patch \*.\*,c=patch >swlist.patches

Darrell

[John Dvorchak]

I didn't see it mentioned so what I like to do on systems that the patch strategy is unkown is to run swinstall with the -p option to get a preview of what will take place. Once armed with that output (/var/adm/sw/swagent.log) I can make a more informed decision on my next step. I include a sample swinstall command just in case the author is not familiar:

swinstall -p -s machine:/path/to/depot \*