A couple of our servers have Oracle maintenance licenses. Our hardware vendor asked there was internet connection in the server room. Our policy is that all machines in that room is isolated from the internet for security reasons. But the maintenance guy asked "then how are we going to be able to do maintenance work on your servers?"
My question is, do our servers need internet connection in order for the maintenance to be carried out like a license verification system. Or can he do it offline? Isn't it a risk in itself if there was an internet connection to our production server?
Best Answer
You would generally need to download patches from the internet then apply them to the server. However it is reasonable to have an intermediate step of copying the patches to an intermediate location (even a DVD) to go between the internet and the database servers.
If they just want a separate machine in the server room that can connect to the internet (eg for reading patch notes), that's another option.
Finally, there's a difference between having a browser running on the server that can connect to the internet and having the server actually accessible as a server from the internet.
It all depends on how secure you want/need to be.