Delegated Administrator 7 - Guide To Patch Upgrades (Doc ID 1547236.1)

Last updated on MARCH 30, 2023

Applies to:

Purpose

A single document that provides a full description of Delegated Administrator 7 patch upgrades.

Scope

This document discusses the technical details of "patch upgrade" of Delegated Administrator 7. Upgrades from previous major versions (Delegated Administrator 6.x or iPlanet Delegated Administrator) are not discussed.

For the purposes of this dicsussion, major versions are the product name + the version number. In other words: iDA, DA6.x, and DA7 are different major versions. Minor versions are the specific version in each patch release.

What is a patch upgrade?

A "patch upgrade" uses a Solaris (or Linux) package system to delivery a new version of a product via the patching mechanism. Solaris/SPARC and Solaris/x86 use the Solaris packaging system. Linux uses RPM.

For Delegated Administrator 7, patch upgrades are used to upgrade from older minor versions of DA7 to newer minor versions.

What is a "DA product upgrade"?

Historically the upgrading from DA 6.x -> DA 6.4 was done via a patch upgrade, because these versions were all delivered via the same Solaris package.

Delegated Administrator 7 introduced different Solaris package names, so upgrading from version 6.x to version 7 cannot be done via a patch upgrade. Upgrading from Delegated Administrator 6 to 7 involves switching from an old package to a new package in the same installation.

For lack of a better term, this is often called a "product upgrade" (even though it is really a Solaris packaging side-grade).

Communications Suite customers may find the details of a "DA product upgrade" confusing because different approaches are used elsewhere in the suite. For example, Convergence uses the same package name for both versions (1 and 2), but incremented the package version number, which triggered the creation of a new patch base, even though the package name remained the same.

NOTE: If you are doing a DA product upgrade to DA7 (from any DA 6.4 or earlier), please consider creating an SR and discussing your plans with support before proceeding.

What is commpkg upgrade doing when it upgrades you to Delegated Administrator 7?

The Comms Installer is a user-friendly, high-level package manager for all Communications Suite products. It understands and manages the DA packages and patches for you. For example, "commpkg upgrade" will always select the correct form of upgrade (patch vs. product).

"commpkg upgrade" will patch upgrade Delegated Administrator 7 from older versions to the current version in the Communications Suite release that you downloaded.

"commpkg upgrade" is platform savvy - it runs patchadd in Solaris and rpm in Linux.

When should I use commpkg upgrade?

When the Communications Suite is released, the suite includes both the most recent product releases, and their equivalent patches. "commpkg ugprade" is most useful when upgrading the entire Communications Suite from one suite release to another. Testing and evaluation systems are good targets for commpkg upgrade.

Commpkg upgrade can only upgrade to the version (patch level) that was included in the release.

If you are upgrading to a patch that is newer than the version bundled in a release, you need to upgrade manually.

Details

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