All,

I thought, as a public service, that I would publish some problems that I
have had patching systems recently.  My therapist recommends that I not go
into the gory details as I may suffer a relapse and end up in an
institution.

1.  Even though it seems that adding Power Patch 7 and a 100bt Subsys tape
at the same time is legal, it does not always work.  If the version of 100bt
is version "A" and not version "B" the software will not install correctly.
From my experience, any "off-hours" engineer 1)will not know about this
problem and 2)If you are using Patch/iX they will not be able to help you at
all. The first time I called the answer to my problem was, "Let's start over
with Autoinst".  My reply was, "Isn't Patch/iX a supported tool?"  I found
that the engineers that work 8-5 M-F know about it and are able to help.  It
seems to me that the off-hours engineers should be as well if not more
versed in patching because that is when most patching is done.

2.  Because of the extended life of 5.5, adding Power Patch 7 could push the
start image past the 16mb limit making it unusable.  The answer to this
problem is to install from an early version of 5.5 and install Power Patch 7
on top of it.  HP is working on a way to increase the max size of the start
image.

I had an idea about a new patch manual while going through all of this.  I
would like to know what other people think of it.  I think that it would be
useful if the ESC had a utility that could download a manual that was
customized to whatever patch process a person was going to do.  You could
tell it that you were going to install a power patch with reactive patches
using Patch/iX.  The ESC could then create a package that would have just
the information that was needed.  No more skipping from section to section
and HP would not have to print the manuals.

I feel like the poster child for not patching systems and I wanted everyone
to benefit from my experience.

Scott Lindholm
Sr Systems Administrator
Corporate Express
303-664-3264
[log in to unmask]