I do a lot of upgrades for many sites and it's pretty rare that I replace /etc or /var. I would never do it causally and It does happen VERY occasionally, but normally you can tell in the apply jobs (for maintenace updates) what has changed and running DIFF is always a good idea, but I really don't think it's a good practice to just replace them as a matter of course.
Now, changing the release or version makes it more "possible" that something has changed, but even then it's pretty rare that IBM makes changes. I think you should ALWAYS check, and it takes a very short time to run DIFF. I'm a firm believer in not introducing errors into something that works correctly already. Maybe he replaced them because he wasn't sure about something specific about the site. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
