Installing updates on a SUN Solaris server

[isasir]

I'm a Windows/PC guy. However, there is one SUN Solaris SPARC server in the office, running Oracle.

How "easy" is it to install updates on a SUN Solaris machine? I'm used to things like Windows Update, which anyone can do. Would someone need to have a good understanding of Solaris to run those updates, or is it something that I probably could do with limited knowledge?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Download patch bundle. Unzip patch bundle (gz format, IIRC). Boot to single user mode (they tell you to, but it works without doing this ). Run the installer script included with the patch bundle. Reboot/boot to multi user.

 

[isasir]

If Windows Update is a 2 on a scale of 1-10 on difficulty, where would this rank? Obviously it sounds easy enough, and I'm sure I can get by, but of course, what happens if I screw up.

Basically, talking to this one consultant, who really doesn't care about the money aspect as much, he indicated that it'd be easy enough to do it myself. However, talking to someone else in that same company, who's more about money, he's now saying how it's not advised to do it ourselves, and we should get a contract, etc. We have a good relationship with them though, but I'd hate to throw money away like that, if it's easy enough to do myself.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: isasir
If Windows Update is a 2 on a scale of 1-10 on difficulty, where would this rank? Obviously it sounds easy enough, and I'm sure I can get by, but of course, what happens if I screw up.

Basically, talking to this one consultant, who really doesn't care about the money aspect as much, he indicated that it'd be easy enough to do it myself. However, talking to someone else in that same company, who's more about money, he's now saying how it's not advised to do it ourselves, and we should get a contract, etc. We have a good relationship with them though, but I'd hate to throw money away like that, if it's easy enough to do myself.

I've never screwed it up. Why are you worried about it anyhow? The Unix admin knows what he's doing, right?

 

[isasir]

We're a small company, with 2 tech. people. Neither of us really know Unix well, but we inherited an old Sun server. The Sun system has been stable for the past year, so we got by w/o knowing much of anything, but it recently got hacked, due to lack of updating/maintaining the server (common sense it was bound to happen).

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: isasir
We're a small company, with 2 tech. people. Neither of us really know Unix well, but we inherited an old Sun server. The Sun system has been stable for the past year, so we got by w/o knowing much of anything, but it recently got hacked, due to lack of updating/maintaining the server (common sense it was bound to happen).

Sounds like a bad way to do business.

If things don't break, you can do them easily. If they do break, you can call your contractor. Hire a Unix guy or take some classes.