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Status Not under consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories PTF and Service
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 31, 2021

Repository Search PTF Currency

There's multiple options to check your PTF currency against IBM's recommended PTF's. In order to do so you have to have some kind of connection path to the outside world which we don't have. It would be so much easier if we coudl somehow get this list of recommended PTF's to some kind of internal repository and have the IBM i LPAR's check against that repository. We see this problem with teh PTFMNU within QMGTOOLS as well as with the systools.group_ptf_currency table function.


Use Case:

Where IBM i LPAR's have no way to connect to the IBM PTF webpage.


Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Apr 16, 2021

    They maybe forgot to include this link:

    https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/sites/default/files/inline-files/xmldoc.xml

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Apr 9, 2021

    Can you please tell me how to do what is described in the third point you mentioned?

    The third point was:
    "he XML feed is available and is downloadable, so it is easy to create a SQL program that will parse the XML feed and compare it to the PTFs on your system".

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Apr 8, 2021

    There are several ways to do the compare without requiring an external connection:
    - Create an image catalog of all the PTFs, then you can use Application Runtime Expert (ARE) to compare any endpoint system against that image catalog.
    - Use similar technique with Ansible running on a linux node. That node likely would have access to the internet...and that could then do a compare between the XML feed and an endpoint node.
    - The XML feed is available and is downloadable, so it is easy to create a SQL program that will parse the XML feed and compare it to the PTFs on your system.