Hi Folks,

Welcome to my new blog, http://blogs.oracle.com/Solaris11Life , which is all about the Customer Maintenance Lifecycle for Image Packaging System (IPS) based Solaris releases, such as Solaris 11.

It'll include policies, best practices, clarifications, and lots of other stuff which I hope you'll find useful as you get up to speed with Solaris 11 and IPS.  

Let's start with a version of my Solaris 11 Customer Maintenance Lifecycle presentation which I gave at this year's Oracle Open World and at the recent Deutsche Oracle Anwendergruppe (DOAG - German Oracle Users Group) conference in Nürnberg.

Some of you may be familiar with my Patch Corner blog, http://blogs.oracle.com/patch , which fulfilled a similar purpose for System V [five] Release 4 (SVR4) based Solaris releases, such as Solaris 10 and below.

Since maintaining a Solaris 11 system is quite different to maintaining a Solaris 10 system, I thought it prudent to start this 2nd parallel blog for Solaris 11.

Actually, I have an ulterior motive for starting this separate blog. 

Since IPS is a single tier packaging architecture, it doesn't have any patches, only package updates. 

I've therefore banned the word "patch" in Solaris 11 and introduced a swear box to which my colleagues must contribute a quarter [$0.25] every time they use the word "patch" in a public forum.  From their Oracle Open World presentations, John Fowler owes 50 cents, Liane Preza owes $1.25, and Bart Smaalders owes 75 cents. 

Since I'm stinging my colleagues in what could be a lucrative enterprise, I couldn't very well discuss IPS best practices on a blog called "Patch Corner" with a URI of http://blogs.oracle.com/patch.  I simply couldn't afford all those contributions to the "patch" swear box. :)

Feel free to let me know what topics you'd like covered - just post a comment in the comment box on the blog.

Best Wishes,

Gerry.