Where to find security alerts and patches

The main source of information to obtain security alerts and patches is the sun site. There you can find the list of the latest security alert and yoo will be able to download the latest patches for the Solaris operating system.

As far as patches are concerned, each patch is individuated by a patch number and a revision number. You can see which patches are installed on the machines using the comman showrev -p which will list all the patches installed in the system. However, the output of this command is not very simple to read.

A better solution is to use the command perl /usrlocal/patcheck/patchk.pl. This command will show the list of the patches installed on the system as well as the latest version available for that patches, therefore it can be used to test if the patches are up to date. To know which is the latest version of each patch, this command uses the file /usrlocal/patcheck/patchdiag.xref. A guide for this command can be found in /usrlocal/patcheck/userguide.

To obtain the most uptodate version of the patchdiag.xref file you can download it from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/patchdiag.xref. Remember that this file need to be saved in the directory /usr/local/patcheck under Piemonte and that it can be saved there only from the root user of Piemonte.

If it's time to update the patches on the PCs, as we already said, they are available at the sun site. There exist three types of patches:

• Raccomended and Security - these type of patches can be downloaded as a single cluster. Just follow the links on the site;
• Other free patches - these type of patches can be downloaded one by one from the site. There is a link for a search page named patchfinder and there inserting the number of the patches you are able to reach a description page with the option to download the desired patch;
• Non free patches - these type of patches can be downloaded only as registered user. We are not, so we can't download them.

The most important thing, of course, is to download the first type of patches and install the cluster as explained in Installing Solaris patches and updates. Remember that the operating system used by all machines is Solaris 7, so you will have to download the patches for this version of the OS.

There was another way to obtain patches directely from the consultant at uic. It is possible to mount a sharede directory which holds the patch. To do that, as root, execute the command:

mount nfs34a.eecs.uic.edu:/patches /mnt

or

mount nfs40a.eecs.uic.edu:/patches /mnt

Then, you have to go under the directory /mnt/solaris2.7 and execute the appropriate script. However, they are not keeping the patches for this operating system up to date (while the others are) so it is probably useless.

Home

Last Revised: 28 May 2003
Riccardo Serafin