Just tried to install JHF 62 for R81.10 on a 1600 appliance. Took 45 minutes. Forty-five. For a *hotfix*.
This is the kind of operational nonsense that gets hidden in all the glossy "Quantum" marketing. Real-world maintenance windows are measured in minutes, not hours. While everyone's busy over-engineering their k8s pod autoscalers, the basic firmware patching on a core security device is a black box of pain.
The process itself is a joke. It uploads, it "prepares," it sits there for half an hour "installing." Zero visibility, zero granular control. You just sit and hope it doesn't brick.
```
[Expert@HostName:0]# install hotfix jhf_t621.tgz
Uploading hotfix... OK
Preparing to install... OK
Installing hotfix... (45 minutes later) OK
```
For a team actually trying to maintain a sane, automated security posture with frequent updates, this is a non-starter. How are you supposed to schedule this? How do you automate it? You can't. It's a manual, all-hands-on-deck downtime event for what should be a routine patch.
Maybe they've never heard of CI/CD. Or maybe they just don't care.
Keep it simple
Ugh, I feel this so much. That "sit and hope" phase is the absolute worst part of any appliance update. You're completely right about the automation problem - it's impossible to build a reliable CI/CD pipeline for security patches when the process is this opaque and unpredictable.
We had a similar experience with a different vendor's web filter appliance. The update was supposed to be quick, but it just hung on "applying configuration" for 40 minutes with no progress bar. The support response was basically "that's normal sometimes." Makes you wonder if they've ever timed their own processes in a real production environment.
Have you found any workarounds for scheduling, or is it just blocking off a huge window and hoping for the best?
Automate the boring stuff.
Oof, that's brutal. It reminds me of patching older F5 Big-IP appliances, where you'd get the same silent "working..." phase with no indication of what's actually happening. The lack of any status output makes automation and sanity impossible.
I've found the older the appliance hardware, the worse it gets. The "Zero visibility" part is what kills me for automation. You can't pipe that output to a monitoring system or set a meaningful timeout, because the process gives you nothing to latch onto. It's just faith-based patching.
Have you tried pushing this through their official support channel? Sometimes when enough people complain about the operational pain, they quietly improve the verbosity in a later JHF.
Always testing.
Oof, that's a huge window. I don't work with those appliances, but this hits home with the automation problem. That "sit and hope" phase is the part that breaks any scripted rollout we try to build.
How do you even plan maintenance when the time is that unpredictable? Do you just block off a whole hour for every tiny hotfix? Seems like it defeats the purpose of having an automated security posture if the process itself can't be automated.
Tell me about it. The "automated security posture" line is what really gets me. You can't automate a process that provides zero actionable output or predictable timing.
I've had to build wrapper scripts that essentially treat the entire operation as a black box with a ridiculous timeout, then parse logs after the fact to see if it even worked. That's not automation, that's just scheduled manual work.
The worst part? Sometimes it *does* finish in five minutes. So you set your monitoring timeout to ten, and then the next time it decides to take the scenic route for three-quarters of an hour and triggers a false critical alert. It's actively hostile to any sane operational model.
Speed up your build