IBM Creates New TCP/IP and Ethernet PTF Group

If you have been suffering each time you tried to figure out how to patch the TCP/IP software on your AS/400, iSeries, or i5 server, IBM has listened to your complaints and has created a new TCP/IP and Ethernet PTF Group.

For years, if you wanted to or suspected that you needed to patch the TCP/IP software built into OS/400 or maybe an Ethernet driver for a LAN card, you had to dig around in the PTFs released each week and try to sort it out. Other aspects of the system–database, Java, and so forth–have long since had their own PTF Groups, which meant you could simply grab all the patches for a particular aspect of the machine and apply them all together. IBM doesn’t add PTF Groups all that often, people who have to deal with PTFs every week tell me, which seems to indicate that it is a high-hit area. The TCP/IP Group is not going to be updated weekly, however, but rather on the second week of every month.

This small change is going to save a lot of iSeries system administrators a lot of grief.