After several frustrating days of debugging smpatch, I finally found a way to get it working on my X64 Solaris 10 server. I am not 100% certain why this fixed my problem, and since I don’t have access to the smpatch source code I will probably never know. To recap the problem, I was able to register my server with the Solaris sconadm utility, but was receiving the following error each time I ran smpatch to check for new updates:
$ smpatch analyze
Failure: Cannot connect to retrieve Database/current.zip: This system is currently unregistered and is unable to retrieve patches from the Sun Update Connection. Please register your system using the Update Manager.
To get smaptch to run successfully, I first had to remove my server’s assetid from the patch repository. This was accomplished with the ccr utilities “-r” option:
$ /usr/lib/cc-ccr/bin/ccr -r cns.assetid
Once the assetid was remove, I ran the sconadm utility to register my server:
$ sconadm register -a -r RegistrationProfile
sconadm is running
Authenticating user …
finish registration!
After these two tasks completed, smpatch ran successfully and reported a number of patches that needed to be applied. This experience really taught me how much I like yum, and I have since decided to replace smpatch with the pca (patch check advanced) utility after reading Chris’s blog and Frank’s comments. Pca is an AWESOME piece of software, and I wish I would have found it sooner. More to come on pca in future posts.