Re: operating system upgrade

[Lukas Beeler <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 23:27, Tom Liotta <qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> My goal has always been that upgrades should happen without any user
> noticing that it was done, i.e., whatever worked previously should
> still work just as each user expects with no surprises. That takes
> time and effort.

A good goal, but sometimes hard to achieve. Most of our smaller
customers don't do any maintenance on their i themselves, so they have
a pretty standard setup. It's easy to upgrade those machines, as we do
QA on our software internally before officially supporting it on newer
OS releases.

The main problem are customers with heavily customized setups, no
documentation, and no test machine. But even then - we have no 24/7
customers. So you go in on a friday evening, do two Save 21s, upgrade
the the OS (it's now saturday evening) and have some people come in
and test it - fix whatevers broken.

Contrary to other operating systems (i'm looking at you, Windows),
inplace upgrades are pretty painless on the IBM i.