Solaris patching

Patch Check Advanced (pca) generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads patches. It resolves dependencies between patches and installs them in correct order. It can be the only tool you ever need for patch management, be it on a single machine or a complete network.

Sun has offered various tools in the past for patch analysis and management, e.g. PatchDiag, PatchCheck, PatchPro, smpatch, Sun Update Connection (see the Sun Patch Portal for details). Some of them are not actively maintained, some are huge and opaque, some don't run on older Solaris releases or stripped-down machines, some require complicated installation and registration procedures.

This is the intro for Martin Paul's excellent pca tool. Well said, and he's even ommiting the changes in underlying Sun tools and sites: updatemanager, anonymous FTP, wget, showrev, patchadd, installpatch, install_cluster, sunsolve, Sun xVM Ops Center (try pronouncing that), sunconnection.sun.com, updates.sun.com, updateserver.sun.com...