Hi folks:

I guess someone from HP had better respond here, so here's my perspective
from the patch and installation area.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Lindholm [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 10:03 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Patch Pitfalls
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> 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.

Hmmm. Not good. I haven't heard about this specific problem, and HP Support
has told me that they haven't been able to reproduce it. I'll see if I can
get a better answer.

> 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.

The recommendation from "off-hours" support in this situation was quite
unfortunate. Yes, Patch/iX is very much a supported tool and one that we
(HP) recommends our customers use over AUTOINST and AUTOPAT whenever
possible. All I can say here is that I will continue to work hard at making
sure HP consistently supports this product. Patch/iX has gotten quite a bad
rap because 1) in the early days, there were enough bugs and annoyances to
discourage people from using it, 2) somehow we didn't do a great job of
training the Support community on it, and 3) from my experience Patch/iX is
very good at finding problems caused elsewhere in the process or environment
and making it look like it's Patch/iX's fault (checksumming and patch
qualification comes to mind here).  The bottom line is keep using this tool,
and don't settle for "well, just use AUTOPAT/AUTOINST".


> 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.

Ok, hear me out on this one before you hit the REPLY button...

HP's official recommendation for those who are in danger of running into the
16MB START image limit is to rebuild the NL from a base 5.5 plus PP7 as
alluded to above. Why? Because this kind of cleanup will not only help
remove the danger of hitting the START size limit, but will also remove a
lot of the extra time-consuming branches that a heavily patched NL contains.

HOWEVER, we realize that this is a painful solution for many of our
customers. We also realize that most of us are perfectly willing to risk a
negligible performance hit rather than doing all that extra patching work.
So, we are currently investigating support for a greater than 16MB START
image to avoid hitting this limit on heavily patched systems. We expect to
have an answer on this soon.

Oh, and how can you tell if you are close to the 16 MB limit? Easy: do a
LISTFILE,2 on START.MPEXL.SYS. If the EOF is low (like 3823 for example),
things are fine. If you are near the 8192 (16MB) limit however (say like
7843), it's time to start looking at this more closely.

> 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...

OK, here's some good news: Starting in the October release of HP ESC, you
will see the following changes: 1) 5.5 and 6.0 patches bundled using
STORE-to-disk instead of MOVER (finally!), 2) easy access to the latest
versions of Patch/iX, and 3) a simple, downloadable Patch/iX installation
guide. Although this guide will not be quite as fancy as Scott's suggestion,
it WILL be a lot simpler to follow. Not a bad idea about the "customized"
manual though. Hmmm, let me think about that...

Hope this helps.

Michael Dovano
MPE/iX OS Patch and Installation
Commercial Systems Division, Hewlett-Packard
19447 Pruneridge Avenue
Cupertino, CA 95014

E-mail: [log in to unmask]