Re: burning v5r4 cumulative ptfs to cd

It is of great benefit to our shop to be able to receive CD images
electronically and read them from an image catalog.

In my case, I do not have easy physical access to the machine. I am 3
hours away from the CD drive! Our closest System i person on-site has to
trudge down several flights of stairs and then go across two buildings
to get to a computer room with no decent workspace for humans (therefore
not a good place to spend the afternoon loading CDs).

Even when I do an OS upgrade, I copy all the CDs to images and then
leave them on the system. On occassion, we have needed to add a LICPGM
or program option that we did not know in advance that we would need.
This way, we don't have to go looking for the CDs (our company has the
habit of relocating our storage areas without telling us). I can add the
LICPGM and then reinstall the latest cume quickly with no hassle.

The image catalog also gives us the ability to stage PTF groups for
installation. As a development shop, the system load can be quite
unpredictable so we never really know when we're going to get a break in
the action to be able to install maintenance. With the image catalog, we
can be ready at a moment's notice. Granted, you could do the same thing
with CDs, but like I said, without easy physical access to the machine,
the image catalogs save a lot of time & effort.

Well worth a few GB of disk space in our case.

-Marty

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date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:19:50 -0500
from: Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: burning v5r4 cumulative ptfs to cd

Hi Jerry,

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but... do image catalogs make sense
if you have only one machine to install to? I see people discuss them
frequently on this and other forums, but I really don't understand the
point. Why waste gigabytes of disk space on CD images when you can just
load the PTFs directly from the CD?