In some cases applicable updates may fail on SLES devices during the installation

Products

• Patch Management Solution for Linux
• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Sometimes applicable updates (updates with higher versions than the ones on the system)  may fail on SLES devices during the installation.

Cause

The list of updates sent down to zypper install command would break existing RPM dependencies and user interaction is required to provide the choice (among the choices that zypper suggests) of how these dependencies can be violated for the installation to proceed.

For more details see the --force-resolution switch of the zypper install command.

Resolution

To make sure that you are not including such updates into the software update policy, run the following shell command on your SLES client:

ZYPP_CONF='/opt/altiris/notification/swuagent/var/repo/smf-yum-repository.conf' /usr/bin/zypper list-updates | grep <name_of_the_RPM_being_installed>

If the output does not show the package and Patch Management Solution reports it as applicable then most probably such package will fail during the installation.

 

In IT Management Suite 8.6, extra logging has been added.
Search for “Failed to process Yum transaction.” in the NS agent logs and it will explain the failure reason.

Example of the logs: