Patch management is one of the most difficult tasks for any System Manager, regardless of OS. I suspect, though I have no direct evidence to support it, that most MPE System Managers, particularly those who grew up with MPE, do not apply reactive patches unless they are doing it to fix a problem they’ve already experienced. In fact, my guess is that most do not even keep up with PowerPatches. And when they do, it is mostly to get new features rather than for the patch fixes. Proactive patching is just not part of the MPE mindset; probably due to the HP3000’s legendary reliability. Most patches occur to fix problems in new functionality or to fix corner case problems that do not affect the majority of systems. Also, the patch process for most people still implies the always-slow, sometimes-unreliable tape update and thus is to be avoided. ¹ In other words, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is the mantra for many MPE System Managers. For example, I know of one site that is still running a 918 on the base release of MPE/iX 5.5 for over three years with virtually no downtime. If you cut your teeth on Unix, proactive patching seems much more common. And my NT Administrators seem determined to patch our servers as soon as a service pack is released is released by Microsoft, whether we need it or not.

For those interested in proactively patching their systems, Mark Bixby (he of Apache/iX, Syslog/iX, Bind/iX, Sendmail/iX, etc. fame) created the shell script Patchman, currently in release 2.1. Patchman can be downloaded from:

ftp://ftp.bixby.org/pub/mpe/patchman-2.1 or http://www.bixby.org/ftp/pub/mpe/patchman-2.1

Transfer it to your HP3000, enter the shell and execute the script with the –h switch to get a display of all possible options.

So, what does Patchman do? Patchman is a patch management tool that analyzes the patches previously installed on your system (HPSWINFO.PUB.SYS) against information downloaded from HP (us-ffs.external.hp.com – ideally directly from your HP3000 though you can manually download the files to a PC, transfer them to your HP3000 and still analyze them with Patchman), looking for:

patches that have been marked bad

patches that have been superseded by downloadable patches

patches that have been superseded by non-downloadable patches

patches that are unrecognized (generally alpha or beta patches)

Patchman then suggests which new patches you might want to download and install:

new patches superseding any of your previously installed patches

new patches for FOS or HPSWINFO-patched subsystems

new patches for other subsystems

Patchman can optionally download and unpack any recommended patches (assuming your HP3000 can ftp directly from HP’s ftp site). As of version 2.0, Patchman supports the new store-to-disk format for patches.

I ran Patchman on one of my MPE/iX 5.5 systems shortly after applying to PP7. I was thoroughly depressed at the number of patches qualified by Patchman. Then I realized that many of them were patches that failed to qualify when I applied PP7 because, for example, we did not have the product. Even still, there were a surprising number of patches that Patchman qualified. What is one to do?

Patchman comes with a VERY important warning: "This tool is not a substitute for exercising your own good judgement or talking to the Response Center!!!!!" Also, "No attempt is made to analyze dependency information. That’s a job for Patch/iX anyway. (You ARE using Patch/iX, aren’t you?)."

Patchman is freeware and officially unsupported. Patchman can greatly simplify the process of proactive patch management as a tool and aid, but it does not replace your on good common sense, knowledge and experience.

One caveat: I ran Patchman on three systems, one MPE/iX 6.0 PP1 and two MPE/iX 5.5 PP7. On one of the 5.5 machines, the script would hang, creating a hung session that could only be cleared by hard halting the machine. Not a nice thing. This is repeatable on this machine. Patchman initiates several forks and for some reason, on this machine only of the three, a dealy embrace occurs. Repeatably. A memory dump was taken and sent to HP. Apparently, at least one other user has experienced the same problem. It is rare but a very bad thing nevertheless. Therefore, much like with sysinfo, try Patchman but only in a situation where you can afford downtime in case you get a hung session. If and when a solution is found, I will use HP3000-L and the 3000 News/Wire to announce it.²

1 Stage/iX promises to eliminate the tape update step and greatly reduce the time required applying patches. Unfortunately many patches are not stageable. For example, 5.5 PP7 and 6.0 PP1 were not stageable on any of my systems because they contained patches that were not stageble. But help may be on the way. According to Michael Dovano (MPE/iX OS Patch and Installation group of CSY): "Actually, we're currently looking into removing the barriers that limit the staging of all MPE/iX patches. If we are able to accomplish this, you will easily be able to stage a PowerPatch release. Right now, a patch is rejected by Stage/iX (in the patch qualification code of Patch/iX) if it contains 1) an installation job (‘IHF’ file) that does post-patch application processing or 2) the file MMSAVE.MPEXL.SYS (the disk IPL). A PowerPatch bundle invariably contains several of these types of patches, and hence is not ‘stageable’ without doing a lot of vetoing of individual patches (not something I recommend doing)."