PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion ()

Lee Roth | 30 May 2012 18:25

Linux box as local patch server?

Sadly, our shop has begun a migration away from Sun iron/Solaris to
commodity iron/VMware/Red Hat Linux. <sniff>

I've been asked to plan conversion of as many of the Solaris boxes as
possible to Linux.

Currently, my PCA setup is a "local patch server" on my in-house network
that all of the individual Solaris boxes point to for patching, and the
local patch server is then the sole box that pulls patchdiag.xref and
patches from Oracle.

Question: Can anyone think of a reason that the PCA local patch server
could NOT reside on a Linux server?

Thanks!

Lee

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Fred | 30 May 2012 19:08

Re: Linux box as local patch server?

There is no reason. It will work. A patch proxy is nothing more than a CGI empowered apache server. The underlying OS of the proxy plays no part what patches the proxy downloads and provides to it's clients. You could therefore make your patch proxy the first Linux host on the road to migration -- ironic though that may be.

On a completely seperate note, it could be said that VMWare licenses + RHEL suport + commodity iron is about the same price as Oracle iron + OVM + OEL (the latter two of which have no cost when deployed on Oracle hardware). But everyone's mileage varies when it comes to what deals they cut with their vendors.

Fred

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Lee Roth <patch20 <at> easy48.com> wrote:

Sadly, our shop has begun a migration away from Sun iron/Solaris to
commodity iron/VMware/Red Hat Linux. <sniff>

I've been asked to plan conversion of as many of the Solaris boxes as
possible to Linux.

Currently, my PCA setup is a "local patch server" on my in-house network
that all of the individual Solaris boxes point to for patching, and the
local patch server is then the sole box that pulls patchdiag.xref and
patches from Oracle.

Question: Can anyone think of a reason that the PCA local patch server
could NOT reside on a Linux server?

Thanks!

Lee

--
Fred Chagnon
fchagnon <at> gmail.com

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Martin Paul | 31 May 2012 08:46

Re: Linux box as local patch server?

Lee Roth wrote:
> Question: Can anyone think of a reason that the PCA local patch server
> could NOT reside on a Linux server?

No, that should be fine. While I'm not using such a setup here, I've had reports 
from people who run a PCA local caching proxy on Linux machines successfully.

Martin.