Group PTF levels don't come out all that often. The HIPER group is every two weeks, but the other groups are every couple of months at least. Whenever a new version of a group PTF comes out on the heals of an earlier version it usually means that the high priests in Mecca (aka Rochester, MN) are correcting some kind of unforeseen problem. Sometimes they add a new PTF but more often than not they remove some PTF's. Always without explanation.
Last Friday our Lord Ib'm came out with level 18 of the V5R4 HTTP group PTF SF99114 and yesterday they issued level 19. In so doing they removed two PTF's from the group: 5722DG1-SI35431 and SI35432. The PTFs haven't been PE'ed, but I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to install them. On the one hand these two PTFs update the Apache server to the latest level (2.0.63) and fix a security problem (CVE-2008-2939). On the other hand it might cause other problems that our Lord Ib'm has seen fit not to reveal to us.
Showing posts with label HTTP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HTTP. Show all posts
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
IBM PE's seven PTFs for V5R4.
While my pastoral duties at this community are normally rather dull, my favorite activity is working with the most holy code (i5/OS) and PTFs (Parchment Temporary Fixes). I especially love it when I find an error in the code that causes the cardinals and bishops in Rochester to do something drastic.
A couple months ago, as part of a HIPER recommendation, we installed PTF 5722SS1-SI34484. The following Monday morning the BACKUP job was looping forever waiting for an HTTP server job to end. We didn't associate it with the PTF right away because this isn't the first time the backup got held up by something like this. By the time we'd figured out that this was a trend we'd already installed another HIPER recommendation, PTF 5722SS1-SI34576, which superceded the one installed previously.
So we were now stuck in an untenable situation. We couldn't remove the PTF and we didn't want to reload the O/S. Being in this kind of pickle can really focus the mind. I ended up writing a program that detected these zombie HTTP server jobs and killed them with ENDJOBABN.
The minions of our Lord Ib'm eventually discovered that a thread in the HTTP job was prematurely destroying the list of open files. The job would then sit there forever waiting of the files to close not knowing that that list was gone. In the end they had to PE a bunch of PTF's and since two of them were HIPER recommendations the fixing PTF (SI35317) was also made a HIPER.
Final tally was seven PE'ed PTFs and one HIPER, all from one PMR.
A couple months ago, as part of a HIPER recommendation, we installed PTF 5722SS1-SI34484. The following Monday morning the BACKUP job was looping forever waiting for an HTTP server job to end. We didn't associate it with the PTF right away because this isn't the first time the backup got held up by something like this. By the time we'd figured out that this was a trend we'd already installed another HIPER recommendation, PTF 5722SS1-SI34576, which superceded the one installed previously.
So we were now stuck in an untenable situation. We couldn't remove the PTF and we didn't want to reload the O/S. Being in this kind of pickle can really focus the mind. I ended up writing a program that detected these zombie HTTP server jobs and killed them with ENDJOBABN.
The minions of our Lord Ib'm eventually discovered that a thread in the HTTP job was prematurely destroying the list of open files. The job would then sit there forever waiting of the files to close not knowing that that list was gone. In the end they had to PE a bunch of PTF's and since two of them were HIPER recommendations the fixing PTF (SI35317) was also made a HIPER.
Final tally was seven PE'ed PTFs and one HIPER, all from one PMR.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Apache update v2.0.52 has problems.
On our web server V5R3 PTF 5722DG1-SI17010 causes HTTP/500 server failures. It might be related to SSL because our non-SSL web servers weren't affected. We're currently in touch with the almighty on this problem. Originally support thought it was related to another problem but the messages in the error log were different.
Ib'm requested and we collected an HTTP trace with the PTF applied and it's been zipped up and emailed to support. I'll add comments to this article when we know the outcome.
Ib'm requested and we collected an HTTP trace with the PTF applied and it's been zipped up and emailed to support. I'll add comments to this article when we know the outcome.
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