Help & Support
Keeping a Tru64 UNIX system up to date
Compaq make many patches for Tru64 UNIX systems publicly available. Unix Support mirrors these on its server in the directory /public_patches/DEC (the name is historical). Within this directory are subdirectories for each operating system.
The patch files take the form of tar files with very unclear names. Most of these are patches for separate products. The most important file is the one corresponding to the base operating system. The name this takes varies between vresions as the base name of the operating system changes from version to version.
First you need to know what version of the operating system you are running. On a sane Unix, the command "uname -r" will tell you the operating system version. However, Tru64 UNIX and IRIX are insane in this regard. Running "uname -r" on any 4.0x system (4.0, 4.0A, 4.0B etc.) will just give "4.0".
On recent versions of Tru64 UNIX (starting from about 4.0A), "sizer -v" will return the OS version string, which includes the necessary information. On earlier versions, it seems to be necessary to run the command "uname -v" and find out what OS version the revision number returned corresponds to. Unfortunately, we are aware of no central repository of these revision numbers, so we offer the following incomplete table of the values we have been able to determine ourselves. If anyone has more values to add to this table, please email them to unix-support@ucs.cam.ac.uk and we'll incorporate them.
uname -v | O/S full name |
|---|---|
| 10 | DEC OSF/1 V1.2 |
| 113 | DEC OSF/1 V1.3A |
| 358 | DEC OSF/1 V3.0 |
| 17 | DEC OSF/1 V3.2A |
| 148 | Digital UNIX V3.2C |
| 386 | Digital UNIX V4.0 |
| 464 | Digital UNIX V4.0A |
| 564 | Digital UNIX V4.0B |
| 564.32 | Digital UNIX V4.0C |
| 878 | Digital UNIX V4.0D |
| 1091 | Digital UNIX V4.0E |
| 1229 | Digital UNIX V4.0F |
| 910 | Digital UNIX V5.0 |
If this does not give you the information you need then you can find the version by looking in the file /etc/motd if it has not been removed by the system administrator or in the boot messages wihin the files /var/adm/messages* if the system was booted reecently enough. The line in either case should look analogous to this:Digital UNIX V4.0F (Rev. 1229); Thu Jan 27 09:10:23 GMT 2000
which identifies a 4.0F system.
Now that you know the version, you can identify the relevant subdirectory of patches. The most important patchset within the directory is the operating system patch but there are others.
For versions between 3.2x and 4.0x the name of the O/S patch starts with "duv32" or "duv40". ("duv" stands for "Digital UNIX version".) In version 5.0 this has changed to "t64v50" (for "Tru64 UNIX version 5.0"). As of 2000-02-10 the files were as listed below.
| Version | O/S patch file |
|---|---|
| 3.2C | duv32cas00004-19980414.tar |
| 3.2D-1 | duv32de1as00003-19980227.tar |
| 3.2D-2 | duv32de2as00004-19980311.tar |
| 3.2E-1 | duv32de1as00003-19980227.tar |
| 3.2E-2 | duv32de2as00004-19980311.tar |
| 3.2F | duv32fas00003-19980714.tar |
| 3.2G | duv32gas00005-19990310.tar |
| 4.0 | duv40as00006-19980610.tar |
| 4.0A | duv40aas00008-19990310.tar |
| 4.0B | duv40bas0010-19990820.tar |
| 4.0C | duv40cas00007-19990316.tar |
| 4.0D | duv40das0005-19991007.tar |
| 4.0E | duv40eas0003-19991110.tar |
| 4.0F | duv40fas0002-19991116.tar |
| 5.0 | t64v50as0001-19991025.tar |
Each tar file needs to be unpacked, typically in /tmp or /var/tmp. The file unpacks into a directory called "patch_kit" which in turn contains a shell script called "dupatch". It is this script that will do the work.