On Thu, 7 Dec 2017 20:05:15 +0000, Jesse 1 Robinson <[email protected]> wrote:
>Each shop needs to craft its own policy on software maintenance. At one time >not that long ago, a new z/OS release came out every six months (!). Many >shops skipped releases because they didn't have time for each one. Now the >release interval is two years, which changes the scheduling dynamic a lot. As >others have suggested, pay attention to HIPER and FIXCAT, and ERRORSYSMOD >reports. > >I thi k the best practice is to install a recent RSU--maybe the latest, maybe >one back--with a few extra important fixes (as above) laid on top. The *day* >you decide to go forward, pull HOLDDATA one more time and revise your plan if >necessary. Do this as frequently as your enterprise can tolerate. If it takes >you months to roll out maintenance to all LPARs, that extends the update >interval. However, it also raises the importance of being as current as >possible when you leave the starting gate. > >Here is my guiding ROT. If something goes seriously south in my system, I >imagine having to explain it to my boss. If it turns out that the vendor >issued some kind of alert for this issue... > >1. I took the recommended action, which turneo out to cause yet a worse >problem. >2. I decided that we would not be impacted, so I chose to ignore the alert. > >I would not want to have to defend #2. > >. What Skip said! Hopefully at least quarterly RSU. If not that, twice a year. I know some shops have LPARs that can only be IPLed once a year. Obviously they are not getting quarterly RSU maintenance rolled out the easy way (via IPL). The part I wanted to stress the Skip wrote (and why I chimed in) was his advise to pull the HOLDDATA and run report errorsysmods when you decide to go forward. For me it isn't "the day of", but it will be on Friday of the weekend of the scheduled IPLs. Since it takes at least a couple of months to roll out to 30 LPARs, I run it again before the next set of IPLs (different sysplexes / environments can run into different problems). My client did get burned big time once with an LE PTF to support Enterprise COBOL 4 (IIRC) that broke COBOL behavior with Enterprise COBOL 3. I think it went PE on the Thursday or Friday before the IPLs and we didn't know. It caused days and weeks of re-runs of some applications because the problem with the data wasn't found immediately. Regards, Mark -- Mark Zelden - Zelden Consulting Services - z/OS, OS/390 and MVS ITIL v3 Foundation Certified mailto:[email protected] Mark's MVS Utilities: http://www.mzelden.com/mvsutil.html Systems Programming expert at http://search390.techtarget.com/ateExperts/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
