Re: burning v5r4 cumulative ptfs to cd

[ChadB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Some benefits of using catalogs for upgrades/PTFs on only one box would be:

-All your CD swapping/loading time is done in advance rather than during
downtime (some downtime savings on the upgrade)
-You are reading thru the entire CD by copying it to the IFS in advance
(and thus will probably find any drastic media errors in advance of an
upgrade)
-Not having to physically handle 10+ upgrade CDs and probably 10+ more
cume/group CDs is MUCH less hassle during an upgrade!
-If you've ever had to go back through a set of cume/group CDs because an
error occurred at the end of the process, the reloading process from
catalogs goes much quicker than from CD
-With a HMC and image catalogs it is possible to complete an upgrade
without physically being next to the machine the whole time and
'babysitting' the process

I wasn't sold on the catalogs until actually trying them after taking a
Common session this year... I will continue to use them and was pretty
impressed with the whole setup.  It also seems more and more that IBM
service is pushing the image method of delivery.  I can see wanting to have
a hardcopy of the CDs around for later also, though... I cleaned up the
images pretty quickly after our upgrades.  For most modern boxes with 8
drives or so, a full set of i5/OS upgrade media, cume, and other groups
doesn't take up too much space that it's a concern during an upgrade.




                                                                       
             Scott Klement                                             
             <midrange-l@scott                                         
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Hi Jerry,

> Others are probably going to suggest this, but here goes.  I just
> created an image catalogue and downloaded them straight into the IFS (a
> mapped drive in Windows).

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?
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