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.
2.1.4 .2.1. Uploading Packages to the Satellite
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 solaris2mpm to translate
Solaris packages, patches, and patch clusters to a format that the Satellite can understand.
2.1.4 .2.1.1. solaris2mpm
As mentioned briefly in Section 2.1.1.4, “Differences in Functionality”, solaris2mpm 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 /tm p/ will be used for this purpose. However, the --
tempdir 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.m pm
Opening archive, this may take a while
Writing out RHATrpush-3.1.5-23.sparc-solaris.m pm
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.m pm
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:
Chapter 2. Red Hat Satellite and Solaris-specific Information
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