On Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:48:42 -0700, Guy Gardoit <[email protected]> wrote:
>I've never seen the logic behind delaying the acceptance of a large round of >maintenance, say a quarterly RSU application. Since PTF chains are usually >very long, the ability to RESTORE a single PTF becomes a daunting, if not >impossible task. If there is a problem after a large maintenance run, >you're better off trying to find a fix for your problem than attempting to >RESTORE the 'bad' PTF. That's assuming of course that you stay a quarter >or two back-level in your RSU installations. > >Hence, for large maintenance runs, I usually do an ACCEPT run a week or so >after the APPLY. I see no advantage in delaying it. > > I'll *strongly* disgree with you there. You need to wait on the order of months most likely, not weeks. There is always away to back out the maintenance. Sometimes it's a pain because there is no "GROUPEXTEND" for restore, but using the RESTORE report you can always figure out what to add in addition to what you are trying to restore (then you have to re-apply what you can). Or sometimes you only have to accept a PTF or 2 in the chain and then restore the PE. What's "scary" to me is the number of PTFs that go PE after they've gone though all the CST testing and have been distributed on a quarterly RSU. Or perhaps worse, a HIPER comes out and then it goes PE several weeks later. I follow ASAP very closely and see this all the time. This is why we stay an entire quarter behind the current quarterly RSU for our normal maintenance cycle (see past posts of mine on this). But doing that also means some extra work looking at more current maintenance (from ASAP alerts) and picking and choosing some PTFs that I think could be a problem for our environment and getting them on "now". Mark -- Mark Zelden Sr. Software and Systems Architect - z/OS Team Lead Zurich North America / Farmers Insurance Group - ZFUS G-ITO mailto:[email protected] z/OS Systems Programming expert at http://expertanswercenter.techtarget.com/ Mark's MVS Utilities: http://home.flash.net/~mzelden/mvsutil.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
