Solaris 10, sconadm, and patching

I'm not a big fan of GUIs for simple tasks. Patching, IMHO is a simple task, especially on a home system.

Servers can be a bit trickier...since you want to test the patches and make sure that you aren't going to break something with one of the recommended patches.

But your home system...you really just want to apply all the newest patches for your system.

Now Sun's Update Manger is cool. It's really been a long time coming, given the perl scripts that have been around for years that did the same thing. But finally it's built in and it's pretty stable.

However, the CLI for it is IMHO the best part.

Here is all that I need to do to patch my system:

# smpatch update

Done, all the latest patches will be downloaded and installed. I put the command in cron and I will always be good to go.

However, before I can update, I must register to download the patches. This is done easily with sconadm

First, create a text file that has the following (remember to use your own values) The only values required are the ones I have filled in.

# vi /tmp/registration.txt
userName=sunsolve_user
password=sunsolvepass
hostName=
subscriptionKey=
portalEnabled=false
proxyHostName=
proxyPort=
proxyUserName=
ProxyPassword=
#

Now, we use this script to register the system with SunSolve:

# sconadm register -a -r /tmp/registration.txt

Goldmine right? Well, in my case...not so fast. I ended up with a lot of errors:

sconadm is running
javax.management.remote.JMXProviderException: Connection refused at com.sun.cacao.rmi.impl.CacaoRMIConnectorProvider.newJMXConnector(CacaoRMIConnectorProvider.java:415) at javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorFactory.getConnectorAsService(JMXConnectorFactory.java:415)

Why?

Well, If you are a DHCP user, you will need to make sure that your hostname can be resolved. For me, this meant I had to add it to /etc/hosts and reboot the system.

I have a small network, so I always get the same IP for this system. Added the line to /etc/hosts..and boom. I was in.

Final note, for those Solaris 10 DHCP users with a hostname of "Unknown" simply create the file/etc/nodename with the hostname you want:

# echo "MyHostName" > /etc/nodename

Now reboot!