Re: Fix Central missing emails?

On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 11:27 PM Marc Rauzier <marc.rauzier@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Normally, this is possible. You can use the same https proxies for HMC,
IBM i partitions, VIOS, AIX, IBM Storage. Normally, ECS/ESA works the
same way on all those platforms.

That sounds promising. I am going to ask our IBMi team to try this out

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.3?topic=agent-using-electronic-service

and see if they get a connection

The documentation isn't clear on that point but if the service allows
http/https why does it have to be an IBMi partition? Could it not be any
client that uses https and can point to the target and/or proxy?

The support page I provided is explicitly for IBM i partitions. I am not
sure that you can use the same setup (I mean https proxy) outside of any
IBM tool. When using SNDPTFORD command, the PTFs package is built on
FixCentral servers and the URI is dynamic and built at this time, and
known only by the tool (I mean, I am not aware of any way to retrieve
this URI so that you can use it outside of the tool). If you order the
PTFs directly on FixCentral, as you noticed you will receive an URI to
be used only through sftp or FTPS, unfortunately not https

Unfortunately as a financial institution all file transfers from desktop
and servers are blocked apart from those in the DMZ so we can't use (s)FTP
or SFTP directly.

I am still convinced that downloading directly from the IBM i partition,
even through a proxy, is a good way to proceed:
* it avoids several manual operations (download from internet into an
intermediate system, then uploading to an IBM i partition) involving
maybe distinct teams (the team who is administering the intermediate
system, the team who is administering the IBM i partition)
* if you download the PTF package as an image catalog (SNDPTFORD can
order as save files and as image catalogs as well), it is ready for
providing a netwok install source for all the IBM i partitions (at
least, from a network point of view, for the local partitions)
* with a couple of CL instructions, the process to "order/download/make
them available" regular PTFs packages such as CUMPKG and ALLGRP can be
automated from your IBM i partition ; unfortunately, if your IBM i
partition does not have direct https acces to IBM internet sites, you
cannot use GROUP_PTF_CURRENCY view to become aware of a new available
group (several years ago, I initiated an RFE so that this view uses the
same setup as ECS/ESA in case of using a proxy so that the view can work
in that case, but the RFE
[
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=111550]

is still in "Uncommited candidate")

Division of responsibility is always an issue. But my cunning plan for
single or small packages that IBM sends out with a logon and password for
FixCentral is to pass that information to our file transfer team. They will
logon to the iBM server and download the files and place them on a specific
LAN location. An automated script will then run to drop those files using
internal SFTP to our development IBMi LPAR where they can be installed and
moved to other LPARs as needed (just using FTP since we allow internal FTP
between our IBMi LPARs in specified VLANs).

Might have to look at SNDPTFORD for larger CUMs or releases but I do recall
when we turned over our brand new servers to a new support organisation, I
had to arrange for some quite large downloads (PTF's CUMs and firmware
updates) to get our servers up to current patching levels.