Help for TPF Product Maintenance

The TPF product releases maintenance online. TPF customers can learn about program updates and download changes by following the links.

Who Is This For?

This service is for TPF customers only. All customers have access through a user ID and password. To obtain access to these pages, contact the TPF Customer Service Desk for your user ID and password.

Each customer is given a single user ID and password for use by anyone in that customer's organization. The passwords will be changed periodically and registered customers will be informed directly about the changes.

What Is Available?

Each APAR has one or more files associated with it.
  • The information for a specific APAR is a Web-enabled version of the IT APAR description called an APEDIT.

    APEDITs have accompanied TPF APARs for many years. This APAR information is suitable for printing from your browser and contains links to files for download.

  • The source, listing, and binary files associated with an APAR are found by following links at the end of the APAR information (APEDIT) file. Clicking on a link starts the download process for a file.

    Not all APARs have every kind of file; for example, object-code-only files only have binary files. The files listed are the ones available.

  • If no files are available for download, a message saying this is displayed instead.


Several other kinds of files are available for download. These are text files containing general information.

  • The Closure Sequence files give the order in which the APARs are applied.
  • The New Parts files list new parts that were created for a PUT. These are to be added to allocator and program lists. The file is put on the web when a PUT is closed.
  • The Prerequisites file gives the prerequisite APARs associated with each program segment.
  • The Critical APARs are those that are important for customers because of potential system outages, database integrity, and so on. A critical APAR is an APAR that meets the following criteria:
    • Any Sev 1 or Sev 2 APAR
    • Any APAR that is closed with a PRI answer code (which means that this type of APAR is a correcting APAR to another APAR)
    • Any other APAR that is determined to be critical (causing potential or data corruption).


The General Information section of the maintenance page allows you to open defect reports, get additional tips about download files from the TPF Web site, or give some feedback about how the TPF maintenance Web site is working.

What Is the Overall Process?

The download files are in a compressed text format called PAX, which is sensitive to character translations. Typically, a compressed file would be downloaded to a workstation using a Web browser, the compressed file would be transferred to a hierarchical file system (HFS) server using FTP and, finally, the compressed file would be expanded by using the PAX  command. See the Download Tips page for more information.

FTP is not available for downloading the APAR files from the maintenance pages.

Note: Some people have experienced a difficulty in the names of files as interpreted by the WinZip tool. The name of the downloaded file has underscores ("_") replacing periods ("."). The file itself is correct, however, the name causes WinZip problems. This is a method for working around this difficulty:

  1. Download the file to your hard disk.   (example:  PJ27647_sour ce_ascii_tar.Z)
  2. Right click on the tar.Z file and choose  Open with Winzip
  3. Click "I Agree" button
  4. When this box comes up...
    5. WinZIP2

                Add  "tar" to the end of the name, so you have  PJ27647_source_ascii_tar.tar


                Then click OK.
  5. Next dialog box is winzip asking if it should decompress to a temporary folder,  Click Yes
  6. You should see a box with the tar file contents....   Click "Extract" to extract the files....

    7. WinZIP


Note: Netscape version 4.73 and Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.5 have been tested as download mechanisms. Earlier versions of these browsers may cause problems with the names of downloaded files.

One tested workaround (for Netscape 4.7 on Win NT 4) is to substitute periods (.) in place of underscores (_) and to add a ".Z" extension in the name generated in the SaveAs popup window. Changing the name this way enables decompression tools (such as WinZip) to operate correctly on the compressed file after downloading.

APAR Information on RETAIN

A link to the online RETAIN APAR descriptions is used for some APARs closed before TPF 4.1 PUT 13. This link uses the program temporary fix (PTF) number to form a database query. The results if any are displayed in a web page. The Retain database on the web is complete back to 1998. For other APARs the data is less complete. Some APAR descriptions may not be available.

In some cases the PTF number is not in the Retain database. In these cases the query fails. If you click on "main search", you can use the search page yourself to look for an APAR.

  • Enter the APAR number in the search field and click on "Exact Words" to start the search.
Searching for the APAR number may result in many APEDIT links because the APAR being searched may appear in the Prerequisite field of other APARs.

When you return from the APAR search page, the original APAR description page is displayed.