Remember my last post about Sun's support? Well, not about support itself but rather about tools Sun is providing to users which are crap. OSC is still saying it will be upgraded in March 2008 - it's just couple of weeks left so we will see.
Now I got several new boxes and I want to register them using sconadm - with or without support contract and it doesn't work, which means I can't use smpatch. Raising a ticket has not helped so far either.
Sun should definitely put more love to its patching infrastructure - I don't care if it old, we know Indiana is going to change it all, etc. But in a mean time they should assure that we (customers) have a working solution.
Going back to patchdiag tool... feeling disappointed at Sun.
Or rather I will finally try PCA - so far so good and it works!
Update: for whatever reason PCA make patching unusable - patch* commands started to core dump.
I got smpatach working, thanks to Sun's support (thanks Ben!). The problem is bug id: 6643363 which on systems with 64 or more CPUs makes smpatch to fail.
We have pilot customers using the OSC replacement "Sun Spectrum Member Support Centre" right now. Initial feedback is positive and a late March rollout is still looking good.
ReplyDeleteHaving been a user of both systems I definitely think the new one is better (even in it's v1.0 release). Of course things are a little different so there is a small learning curve.
Cheers, Rob.
I couldn't agree more. Patching Solaris is still not fun at all, and PCA is about the only tool I know that makes it more or less bearable. Any Sun tools for patching I've ever seen have uniformly been pains in the posterior.
ReplyDeleteAdd to that that all Suns own web support tools and training pages are horrifyingly bad, slow and often nonfunctional and as a customer one has to wonder what is going on over there.
The support staff are all great, informed, skilled and helpful, but the web tools dept should all be spanked and/or replaced. Forget the silly sales blab on the front web pages, focus on tools that we the customers must have to maintain our server parks.