Chapter 14. Applying JBoss Patches from the Patch RSS Feed

A content source connects a JBoss ON server to some kind of content delivery mechanism. With JBoss products, the content source is the Customer Portal, which contains all patches for all JBoss products. (A content source can be another content repository, depending on your products and environment.)

A content source identifies a location. A repository within JBoss ON maps a content source to the resources in the inventory that the patches are applied to.

For JBoss patches, the default content provider connects the JBoss ON server to the cumulative patches provided by the JBoss Customer Service Portal. The default repository associated with the content provider is where the metadata about the patches and the patches themselves are stored within JBoss ON.

The JBoss ON agent is the entity which actually executes the patching process on a resource. The agent is informed of updates, pulls the information from the server, and then updates the local JAR and class files within the managed JBoss instance. The patching process runs independently of any server configuration profile or base configuration.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4 can receive and apply patch updates through the JBoss Customer Portal feed in JBoss ON.

Some patches require additional, manual changes, such as editing an XML configuration file. There are several different situations that require manual intervention:

Basically, admin intervention is required to resolve anything that is outside the default configuration, like merging in custom configuration or updating custom libraries.

JBoss ON performs the standard steps required to apply patches to a JBoss instance, but it does not (and should not) have any way to parse and then merge changes in the configuration. JBoss ON does not attempt to determine, value, and apply custom changes. That sort of heuristic is best performed by an administrator.

Any manual steps which are required to complete the patch are listed in the content update summary after the patch is applied.