HP customers were reporting in late May that HP's Electronic Response Center (ESC) has posted some bad MOVER-corrupted patches. HP’s Michael Dovano reported on “a serious problem customers have experienced with patch MPEKXK7C related to the MOVER utility.” Dovano explained that the UNPACKP script which customers use on the HP 3000 to unbundle a downloaded patch into its file components has always used the MOVER utility to accomplish the unpackaging. HP discovered “some time ago” that “at least one version of MOVER contains a bug causing it to damage certain ISL utility components of a patch (UPDATE, for example). In light of this problem we have a standing policy of excluding any patch with ISL utilities from going to the HP ESC Web site until we have a fix in place.”

HP plans to fix the problem by replacing MOVER for packaging patches with the Store-to-Disk function of STORE/RESTORE. STORE is a supported utility available on all MPE/iX systems, and any version of STORE can “restore” a Store-to-disk file. Up to this month, HP 3000 administrators had to beware of bad versions of MOVER, or ones which couldn’t unpack certain patches.

HP admitted “it is taking us a lot longer than we had hoped to put this MOVER to STORE-to-disk conversion in place." A 6.0 patch containing ISL components, MPEKXK7C, recently “slipped” out to the HP ESC site. MPEKXK7 contains among other things the UPDATE PME, which is damaged by the MOVER utility. If you attempt to install this downloaded patch, the UPDATE from tape will fail with a FLT 1009 message. HP noted that “we have found absolutely no instances of further corruption related to the MOVER utility, and we have enough data on the problem at this point to strongly suspect that ‘hidden’ corruption is not an issue.”

Customers like Mark Bixby reported more than a week after the HP notice, “the patch catalogs are inconsistent when it comes to listing or not listing bad patches.” Avoiding the bad patches is a matter of making manual exceptions, a process with a higher potential for error than if HP rebuilt files with a clean version of MOVER. “If I were in charge of the MPE patches, I would immediately switch to building the truck files with MOVER651 and change UNPACKP to refer to MOVER651 instead of the evil MOVER635,” Bixby said. “But I’m not in charge of the MPE patches. However I am in charge of my Patchman script, and I’ve enhanced it to look for catalog inconsistencies as well as MOVER-corrupted patches (by looking for the problem MPEXL.SYS files in the patch remarks).”