HP-UX 11i Version 2 June 2007 Release Notes

Security
HP-UX Software Assistant
Chapter 8
190
Summary of Change
The SWA tool is new for HP-UX releases as of January 2007, includes Security Patch
Check (SPC) and is the HP-recommended utility to use to maintain currency with
HP-published security bulletins for HP-UX software. The bundle name is SwAssistant.
The product number is B6834AA. It incorporates key functionality from Security Patch
Check (SecPatchCk bundle name), ITRC patch assessment, and more.
Impact
SWA is for system administrators who patch and maintain the security of HP-UX
systems.
• Is supported on HP-UX 11i systems.
• Provides a Command Line Interface (CLI).
• Is a client-side patch and security analysis/acquisition tool. It has ITRC Patch
Assessment Tool and Security Patch Check (SPC) capabilities with a few minor
exceptions, namely, patch set analysis.
• Analyzes a system (and some types of depots) for patch warnings, critical defects,
security bulletins, missing Quality Pack patch bundle, and user-specified patches
and patch chains.
• Uses an HP-supplied catalog file to analyze your system and generate reports.
• Optimizes the automatic selection of patch dependencies by accessing the quality of
the dependency, providing the best case scenario for the dependency, minimizing
changes to the system, and assessing future patch dependency changes.
• Produces the Action, Issue, and Detail Reports as well as a consolidated HTML
report for you to see what issues are relevant to the software on the system or in the
depot.
• Provides the ability to download patches and build a Software Distributor (SD-UX)
depot which will fix many of the issues in the report. You can also use SWA to see
recommended additional actions in the report which you need to take care of
manually.
• Verifies patch integrity automatically (using MD5 cryptographic hash) before
unpacking downloaded patches.
Compatibility
There are no known compatibility issues.
Performance
The performance of SWA is strongly characterized by the network
connectivity/performance to get catalogs and get software. In the case of slow network
connections, other operations such as analysis or local collections can be quicker.
Documentation
The HP-UX Software Assistant Web site at https://www.hp.com/go/swa provides the
product overview, download links, and installation instructions.