little help wrote:
Martin, Agreed. However, as you know management loves charts and percentage graphs. I just need some type of measurable indicator as to how much/often we are patching hosts in the environment. The option you provide below seems to be valid but would also become a administrative issue as new builds/images would skew the numbers all together. I am thinking about going through the xref file and trying to parse all possible patches for a specific version - ie sparc Solaris 8.
You'll end up with a pretty useless number again, as this is a very unreliable method to determine applicable patches. But if it's just for management ..
Maybe you should follow Rajiv's advice to use different xref files instead. Then run PCA twice, once with a current xref and once with one that's e.g. 6 months old. The difference in missing patches could be a good incicator to compare patch state between machines. Although I still think that the number alone isn't really significant.
Martin.
