Installation guide

Red Hat Network treats patches similarly to packages; they are listed and installed in the same way

and with the same interface as normal packages. Patches are 'numbered' by Solaris, and will have

names like "patch-solaris-108434". The version of a Solaris patch is extracted from the original

Solaris metadata, and the release is always 1.

Patch Clusters are bundles of patches that are installed as a unit. Red Hat Network keeps track of the

last time that a Patch Cluster was installed successfully on a system. However, Patch Clusters are not

tracked on the client as installed entities so they do not appear in the installed packages or patches

list. Patch Cluster names look like "patch-cluster-solaris-7_Recommended". The version is a

datestring, such as "20040206", the release is always 1 and the epoch is always 0.

4 .1.8.2.1. Up lo ading Packag es to t h e Sat ellite

Red Hat Network does not provide UNIX content; any Solaris packages, patches or Patch Clusters

must be uploaded to the Satellite in a format that it understands from a client system. That package

can then be managed and distributed to other systems. Red Hat Network created so l ari s2mpm to

translate Solaris packages, patches, and patch clusters to a format that the Satellite can understand.

4 .1.8.2.1.1. so laris2mp m

As mentioned briefly in Section 4.1.4, “Differences in Functionality” , so l ari s2mpm is part of Red Hat

Network Push for Solaris. The content that is pushed to a Solaris channel on the Satellite must first

be in .mpm format.

A .mpm file is an archive containing a description of the package data and the package or patch

itself. The solaris2mpm command must be run on the client, never the Satellite.

Note

solaris2mpm requires free space equal to three times the size of any package, patch, or patch

cluster it is converting. Normally, space in /tmp/ will be used for this purpose. However, the -

-tempd i r option allows you to specify another directory if necessary.

Multiple files may be specified on the command line of solaris2mpm. Below is a usage example:

# solaris2mpm RHATrpush-3.1.5-21.pkg RHATrpush-3.1.5-23.pkg

Opening archive, this may take a while

Writing out RHATrpush-3.1.5-21.sparc-solaris.mpm

Opening archive, this may take a while

Writing out RHATrpush-3.1.5-23.sparc-solaris.mpm

Because no other directory was specified, the resulting .mpm files are written to the /tmp/ directory.

Note that the name of the resulting .mpm files includes the architecture of the client on which it was

created. In this case, this was SPARC Solaris. The general format of mpm file names is:

name-version-release.arch.mpm

Patch clusters are "exploded" - .mpm files are generated for each patch in the cluster, as well as a

top-level "meta" .mpm file containing information about the cluster as a whole.

Below are the options of solaris2mpm:

T ab le 4 .2. so laris2mp m op t ion s

Red Hat Sat ellit e 5.7 Client Configurat ion G u ide