On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:41:14 -0500, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote:

>We recently upgraded to 1.13.  Today, I ran afoul of:
>
>From:
>
>    z/OS UNIX System Services
>    Command Reference
>    Document Number SA22-7802-14
>
>    
> http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/BPXZA5C0/SHCMDDES.FILE.6
>
>    SHCMDDES.FILE.6
>
>    Files
>
>    file uses the following file:
>
>    /etc/magic
>        Default system magic file.
>
>    For file to work, you need to copy the magic file from the /samples
>    directory to the /etc directory.
>
>    For more information about enabling file, see the section on copying
>    configuration files in z/OS UNIX System Services Planning. Additional
>    information about the magic file can be found in "magic -- Format of
>    the /etc/magic file" in topic MGC.
>
>Have you ever bought a car that you had to install the
>tires yourself before it would work?
>
>Apparently this requirement is well known among coloro che sanno
>of OMVS systems programmers.  Ours is mandolinisto; he's overburdened
>with other stuff.
>
>Presumably this is to avoid regressing user mods to members of /etc.
>But there's a way to deal with this.  Years ago I took a class in SMP/E
>software maintenance (Amdahl taught it).  One of the exercises was
>to APPLY a USERMOD then attempt to APPLY service that conflicted with
>the USERMOD.  It failed.  RESTORE the USERMOD; APPLY the PTF; then
>re-APPLY the USERMOD.  Why is /etc/magic not handled this way?
>(I'm confident that we have no user mods to that file.)
>
>(Of course, this would work a lot better if SMP/E supported patch(1)
>as a utility for maintaining OMVS text files, even as it supports IEBUPDTE
>for maintaining legacy text files.)
>


/etc containes configuration files for z/OS Unix the same way that SYS1.PARMLIB 
(or the
concatenation) does for z/OS MVS.   If someone replaced your previous /etc with 
the one
that ServerPac delivers "as is", they absolutely did the wrong thing!!   That 
would be like
IPLing with IBM.PARMLIB as your only parmlib.     

The proper (and documented) way to do this is to merge the ServerPac /etc 
into your existing /etc (same with /var) to pick up anything new / added 
without destroying your existing configuration.    Then review migration 
information
(including migration checks from the system health checker both before and
after an upgrade) for any changes you may required or desire to existing
/etc files the same way you would do for any PARMLIB member.

USERMODS for /etc members or PARMLIB members are not practical.  Every 
member is essentially a usermod since they contain local configuration options.
Also, a usermod typically replaces / modifies an existing element and most
parmlib members don't have existing elements (they often have samples
in SYS1.SAMPLIB though).  
    
For PARMLIB, you can concatenate the IBM distributed version so no merge
is needed and it is a little less work then the merge method you need to 
do for /etc.   

Mark
--
Mark Zelden - Zelden Consulting Services - z/OS, OS/390 and MVS       
mailto:[email protected]                                        
Mark's MVS Utilities: http://www.mzelden.com/mvsutil.html 
Systems Programming expert at http://expertanswercenter.techtarget.com/

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