Re: V7R1 Upgrade...SMTP problem

I may grant you #1. One outage compared to 2. But that's on two
considerations. One, they do the upgrade right. One "Oh shirt" that
keeps you wacked (like tcp/ip domain information) could kill that
potential time savings really quick. For example, if you have to email
ASN's to your major customer before the truck arrives or face serious
fines... The second is that 7.1 has been GA for over 2 years now. Surely
they've had enough time during that to have upgraded before now. Let's
add a third consideration. The old machine is going to their HA site. If
they already have a HA site, and they're just upgrading it, they could
have been using that during this conversion and have had minimal downtime.

You'd have to explain a LOT harder about #2. Especially since upgrading
the old box to 7.1 doesn't destroy it nor in any way reduce your ability
to go back to it if the new hardware won't cut it. Perhaps you were
thinking the new box was not only a test of the new hardware but also a
test of 7.1? Well, maybe... But how long do you run on 7.1 before you
say "fall back"? How do you get the transactions back to your old box?
Has anyone ever downgraded OS because the OS upgrade didn't go well?
(Short of some idiot that went CISC-to-RISC or V5R4 to 6.1 and above while
never running ANZOBJCVN.) I still think the risk of screwing it up goes
up higher if you don't upgrade the old box first. Again, I concede that
numerous people have done it. However it does increase the complexity.
For example, you would have thought that TCP domain information would have
been on the checklist. If something that obvious is easy to overlook...
Keep in mind, this ain't your father's AS/400. We're talking about IBM i
now. It could be running Websphere, be your corporate DNS server, hosting
Domino, have an exit point program in place and a flurry of other stuff.
It's not just a simple restore the user profiles, the program library and
a data library.

As far as the conversion running faster in #3. We're talking about an
upgrade from 6.1 to 7.1. Not pre 6.1 to 7.1. Here there's a lot less
object conversion. The upgrade from 6.1 to 7.1 may run a little faster on
the new tin but maybe not enough to overlay the risk.


Rob Berendt