It's a different perspective. A customer has been on the IBM i platform for,
say, 20 years. In those 20 years, he went through 3 or 4 boxes. Each one was
installed and then just worked. No maintenance. No Save 21s.
It's a different world now. Your customer can't sell that philosophy to his auditor, PCI, SOX or HIPAA either. That's why he's calling you.
Yeah. IBM makes mistakes.
Certainly this is true, but I think that it's premature to call this one IBM's mistake. See Chuck's very detailed explanation for details of some possibilities, but the vast majority of PTF installation issues are user issues rooted in things that may have been done incorrectly (or simply in a "non-supported" way,) years previously. This is why Rob made the suggestion he did and why others recommend chickens or goats.
Regards,
Scott Ingvaldson
Senior IBM Support Specialist
Midwest Region Data Center
Fiserv.
-----Original Message-----
From: Lukas Beeler [mailto:lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 2:06 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: IPL hangs at C900 2967, PTF SI30387 on a V5R4 system
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 20:19, Ingvaldson, Scott<scott.ingvaldson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Most of them can't justify the expense in keeping their system current.
As opposed to the expense of *not* keeping their system current?
It's a different perspective. A customer has been on the IBM i platform for, say, 20 years. In those 20 years, he went through 3 or 4 boxes. Each one was installed and then just worked. No maintenance. No Save 21s. Many 170s were installed without disk protection (cost...)
Now he's on his 4th box. There's a new guy who handles the system installation, he's being told something about installing PTFs every 3 months, doing Save 21 Weekly or Monthly, etc. pp.
Who does he believe? His 20 years of experience or a service provider?
If your customer's uptime is so mission critical that they can't spare an hour two or three times a year they really need to be on an HA system.
The problem is cost, not uptime. Or in this case, we finally persuaded the customer to install PTFs, and the procedure took longer than the initial estimate, and IBM had to be involved. He may think that this was
a) Incompetence on my part
b) Incompetence on IBMs
c) A faulty recommendation from my company
Each of these options is bad.
In this particular case it probably wouldn't have helped as this
problem was in an O/S PTF
Yeah. IBM makes mistakes. What you're doing is essentially a workaround that alleviates some common mistakes in IBMs PTF handling - good thing, but it won't help you if IBM fucks up in a different way.
Don't get me wrong, faulty software is normal. I don't think it's a royal fuck up that happened here, just a normal issue that was resolved perfectly on time.
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