HP-UX Patching and Patch Management

HP releases patches to deliver incremental updates to your system. Patches are best known for delivering defect fixes, but also deliver new functionality and features, enable new hardware, and update firmware. You can use HP-UX patches to update HP-UX software without having to completely reinstall your system application.

Hewlett-Packard provides several methods to patch HP-UX systems:

Standard HP-UX Patch Bundles

The HP-UX OE media provides standard HP-UX patch bundles for HP-UX core file sets and applications, plus diagnostic products. Standard patch bundles are collections of patches that have been thoroughly tested together. These bundles enable new hardware, fix known defects, and provide diagnostics tools. In some cases, a patch bundle may deliver new software functionality. All bundle software is cumulative and replaces completely any previous bundle release for the same operating system (OS) release. The standard HP-UX patch bundles are also available on the HP IT Resource Center web site at: http://itrc.hp.com

Individual HP-UX Patches

Individual HP-UX patches comprise the Standard HP-UX patch bundles. The individual patches and patch bundles are available from the Patch Database on the HP IT Resource Center web site at: http://itrc.hp.com

At times, you may find it necessary to acquire and install individual patches, for example, based on known patch IDs, software functionality, reactive patching, and security issues.

HP-UX Software Assistant

HP-UX Software Assistant (SWA) is a command-line based tool that consolidates and simplifies patch management and security bulletin management on HP-UX systems. The SWA tool is new for HP-UX releases as of January 2007. It 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. The SWA tool incorporates key functionality from the Security Patch Check tool (SecPatchCk bundle name), ITRC Patch Assessment, and more.

The HP-UX Software Assistant website at https://www.hp.com/go/swa provides a product overview, download links, documentation links, and installation instructions.

Documentation and References

You can find the following documentation on the HP Technical Documentation Web site at: http://docs.hp.com/

	NOTE: The HP patch resources are for HP-related patches only. To install or upgrade other vendor patches and applications, refer to the appropriate vendor documentation.