What's New in Software Management in the Solaris Operating System?

This section describes the new software management features in this Solaris release.

Deferred-Activation Patching

Patching tools have changed to handle larger patches. Starting with patch 119254-42 and 119255-42, the patch installation commands, patchadd and patchrm, have been modified to change the way in which certain patches that deliver new features are handled. This modification affects the installation of these patches on any Solaris 10 release. These deferred-activation patches are better equipped to handle the large scope of changes that are delivered in feature patches.

For more details, see http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/sundocs/articles/patch-wn.jsp.

Common Agent Container Included in the Solaris OS

The Common Agent Container is a stand-alone Java program that implements a container for Java management applications. This program provides a management infrastructure that is designed for Java Management Extensions (JMX) and Java Dynamic Management Kit (Java DMK) based management functionality. The software is installed by the SUNWcacaort package and resides in the /usr/lib/cacao directory.

Typically, the container is not visible.

However, there are two instances when you might need to interact with the container daemon:

• In the event that another application attempts to use a network port that is reserved for the Common Agent Container.

• In the event that a certificate store is compromised. If this conflict occurs, you might have to regenerate the Common Agent Container certificate keys.

For information about how to troubleshoot these problems, see Troubleshooting Common Agent Container Problems in the Solaris OS in System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration.

Improvements to How patchadd -M Command Handles Multiple Patches

Solaris 10: Starting with the Solaris 10 release, the functionality of the patchadd -M command is improved to enable more effective and efficient handling of multiple patches and dependencies between patches. As a result, you no longer have to specify patch IDs in numerical order when using this command.

Note that if you use the patchadd -M command without specifying a patch ID or patch IDs, all the patches in the directory are automatically installed on the system. To install a specific patch or patches, you must specify the patch ID when using the patchadd -M command.

For more information, see the patchadd(1M) man page.

Package and Patch Tool Enhancements

Solaris 10: The Solaris package and patch tools were enhanced in the Solaris 10 initial 3/05 release to provide improved performance and extended functionality.

As a part of these enhancements, the pkgchk command now provides a new option to assist you in mapping files to packages. To map files to packages, use the pkgchk -P option instead of grep pattern/var/sadm/install/contents. The -P option enables you to use a partial path. Use this option with the -l option to list the information about the files that contain the partial path. For more information see How to Check the Integrity of Installed Objects (pkgchk -p, pkgchk -P) and the pkgchk(1M) man page.