One of the more painful chores for everyone who runs a Unix system is to keep up with the patchwork. There is very little fun that comes with that hassle. However, that could be changing.

At the September meeting of UUASC-OC, our newest meeting host, Jeff Martin of Sun Microsystems, will make his UUASC speaking debut by demonstrating for us some of the latest patch management technologies.

Jeff will demonstrate for us the Aduva product that Sun recently purchased, which is capable of patching Solaris, SuSE, and Red Hat Linux hosts. The new software performs configuration management, patch rollback, baselines, and application deployment. Jeff will describe the product's advantages and disadvantages, and how it can ease the burden of patching.

Jeff has worked eight years at Sun, four as a systems administrator and four with Sun customers as a system support engineer.