Administrator's Guide

h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/
displayInstallInfo.do?productNumber=DynRootDisk#download.
It is helpful during maintenance planning for system administrators to be able to determine which,
if any, patches are not DRD-safe, and to make plans regarding these patches. See the DRD-Safe
Concepts for HP-UX 11i v2 and Later white paper, located at http://www.hp.com/go/drd-docs,
for information about identifying such patches and alternatives on how to manage them without
using the drd runcmd operation.
3.2.2 Patches with special installation instructions
Patches may include Special Installation Instructions, or SIIs, which contain specific tasks for the
user to perform when they install certain patches. If you install patches with SIIs on an inactive DRD
system image, ensure the following:
• You must not stop/kill or restart any processes or daemons. Because the patch is being installed
on an inactive DRD system image, these actions are not needed, and in fact could leave the
running system in an undesirable state. When the inactive system image is booted, all processes
are stopped and restarted.
• Only make kernel changes by executing: drd runcmd kctune
3.3 Updating and managing products with drd runcmd
For non-patch products, a new fileset-level packaging attribute, is_drd_safe, has been introduced.
The value of the attribute defaults to false, so any package created before the attribute was
introduced will be rejected by swinstall, swremove, and update-ux commands invoked by
the drd runcmd operation. Because the DRD product was not available at the initial release of
11i v2, relatively few non-patch products have the is_drd_safe attribute set to true. For HP-UX
11i v3, however, most products will have the is_drd_safe attribute set to true.
To determine if a non-patch product can be installed or removed using drd runcmd, execute the
command:
# /usr/sbin/swlist –l fileset –a is_drd_safe _product_name_
and check that all filesets have is_drd_safe set to true.
3.4 Special considerations for firmware patches
A firmware patch changes the firmware the next time the patched image is booted. Because the
firmware is shared by both the active and inactive system images, there is no ability to have an
unchanged copy of the firmware as a fail-safe mechanism. As a result, the benefit of DRD as a Hot
Recovery mechanism cannot be provided with firmware patches. Firmware patches set the fileset
attribute is_drd_safe to false to supply a checkinstall script that prevents installation in
a DRD session.
IMPORTANT: System administrators need to be aware that any firmware change cannot be
reversed by booting a different system image.
3.5 Restrictions on update-ux and sw* commands invoked by drd
runcmd
Options on the Software Distributor commands that can be used with drd runcmd are limited by
the need to ensure that operations are DRD-safe. The restrictions include the following:
• The -F and -x fix=true options are not supported for drd runcmd swverify operations.
Use of these options could result in changes to the booted system.
• The use of double quotation marks and wild card symbols (*, ?) in the command line must
be escaped with a backslash character (\), as in the following example:
drd runcmd swinstall –s depot_server:/var/opt/patches \*
3.3 Updating and managing products with drd runcmd 19