Tom raises an important point below, as have others in this thread.
Let's tie them together, and do a quick review of John's View of Service
101:
1. Set up a production batch job to receive Enhanced HOLDDATA and PTFs
daily. For HOLDDATA, always get the 2-year file. It's the one with
FIXCAT HOLDs in it. Historically some have whined about "getting too
much data too often," but this is a red herring. The whole file is less
than 3MB, trivial today. Just get the whole thing. (Note: Errors in
the HOLDDATA file itself are corrected with RELEASEs and when necessary
new HOLDs.)
2. Set up another production batch job (maybe weekly) to run REPORT
ERRSYSMODS. Eyeball or postprocess the output to see if there are new
HIPERs in components you care about. Act on what you find to forestall
unanticipated problems.
3. Put on HIPER and PE fixes once a month. (Yes, I know a lot of you
don't have an IPL that often. Get them into production when you can if
you can't do rolling IPLs once a month.)
4. Put on RSU service once a quarter. (Same comment as for #3 repeated
here.)
5. Use REPORT MISSINGFIX to find the delta between what's installed and
what you need installed for new hardware and selected new software
functions for which we supply FIXCAT HOLDs. This function is kind
enough to build you an APPLY job. Since you're already doing #1 above
(right?), you don't have to worry about "missing a missing fix" or going
to get current HOLDDATA first. You can just run the report whenever you
want!
The main points of #1, and why it's so crucial, are simple:
a. You can *never* (near enough) put on a PE without knowing it.
b. In a production outage situation, you will *never* (near enough) need
to go get a fix before being able to install it.
c. An implication of (b) is that if the network function required to
retrieve the PTFs you need are where the problem lies, you don't have to
jump through hoops to get the service (since you already have it).
Tom Marchant wrote:
First, download the latest Enhanced Holddata, which contains all of the
Fixcat information that REPORT MISSINGFIX uses.>
--
John Eells
IBM Poughkeepsie
ee...@us.ibm.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
