What is Sun's answer about PCA patch manager free tool ?

Question

Hi all,
this post aims on echoing customers'feedback.
from customers'experience it seems that smpatch from patch manager tool is suffering of a lack of reliability.
One of them moved to a new freeware called PCA-Patch Check Advanced
http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/
From PCA Web Site we can read:
Sun has offered various tools in the past to analyze Sun/Solaris systems for patches which are installed or missing, e.g. PatchDiag, PatchCheck, PatchPro, smpatch (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. None of them really made me happy. Based on PatchCheck source I implemented PCA, which gets rid of the disadvantages of Sun's own tools.
I would like to know what is Sun's position and could it be possible to integrate such a tool ?
Thanks.
Malek.

Answer 1

- Sun is always interested in customer feedback, and is interested in
the concerns expressed here.I'd also very muck like Sun to be interested in fixing the customers problems, which has not been done in my cases. No solution or explanation has been given to my many cases opened on smpatch, and this, even though in some cases, patches were made (months later): I was never told about them. Which makes me wonder about the point of having paid support contracts in the first place.
But since UM was developed by interns, it's no wonder there's trouble maintaining it (how do I know? I've been an intern doing Java development, and I made the exact same beginner's mistakes, not knowing to handle exceptions, leaving debug output on stdout, being unable to make proper localisation).
It's obviously not the work of experienced Java programmers. Hard to trust it...
- We do understand that opaque is bad, but one of Sun's goals is to
provide complex analysis beyond matching patches with installed
packages. This analysis and its support processes will necessarily
be somewhat opaque.What analysis are you talking about? smpatch is not even able to tell me that security fixes are available for NSS, which has been part of Solaris for years. PCA does.
And what about Studio? Why can't smpatch tell me there are patches for that, too? And why aren't free patches, that are neither recommended nor security (such as the man patches) shown by smpatch when running without a contract?
- We are interested in the concerns surrounding stripped-dow
systems, and are considering a "light" version of our tools that would
support minimal systems. However at this time there are no plans to
release a light version.And what about systems without a network?
And what about not forcing me to read and agreeing to a, abusive license agreement, which can't even be printed, nor shown full screen (5 lines at a time!)?
And, please, can you explain me why I should agree to respect Reuters so-called intellectual property? What does it have to do to with keeping my systems up to date reliably and easily? Is it a competition between Sun and Microsoft to put the most ludicrous licenses on line?
Anyway, I'm sure Solaris 11 will introduce some new bloated offspring of the PatchProManagerUpdateConnection family, so I'm not holding my breath. Rather than repeat this experience again and again, I'll stick with PCA.
Laurent