It seems that Check Point has changed its handling of Jumbo Hotfix Accumulators (JHFA) after many users experienced stability issues with JHFA in the beginning of 2016.
Long, long ago every customer with a support contract was able to download JHFA directly from the Support Center. Then Check Point changed the policy and you had to open a service request to gain access to a JHFA.If you used CPUSE you were able to circumvent this if you knew the file name of the hotfix. Since there was a scheme behind the names this was not quite a problem.
But you were stuck to CPUSE. CPUSE is convenient, so why should this be a problem? It seems to be a problem with VSX. I have never found any line written about this, but I have been told by several supporters from Check Point not to use CPUSE with VSX. And we had a problem in one project to backout a JHFA take via CPUSE. So we were not able to install a higher take on this machines. This resulted in reinstallation of a complete VSX cluster and a special kind of “happiness” at the customers side.
So for VSX you need the JHFA version for legacy installations. And this required creating a cpinfo file, opening a service request, uploading the cpinfo file and – finally – explaining to the first level supporter, that you already uploaded the cpinfo file and wrote that explicitly to the service request.
In those old days you knew that not all takes of the JHFA were perfectly stable, but you did not know which takes had problems. Then came 2016 and you suddenly did not know which JHFA takes were stable enough to use in production environment. But you could pretend that most of the takes had some issues.
Facing these problems Check Point must have decided to change the way they handle JHFA. In the actual version of sk106162: Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator for R77.30 there are two types of JHFA: General Availability Takes (GA Takes) and other takes. A special one is the Latest ongoing Take, the most actual take of the JHFA. I think, you can speak of GA Takes as Stable Takes instead. For other takes I would not take stability for granted.
But Check Point did not only introduce these two different types of JHFA. They also make the latest GA Take accessible without opening a service request. You get access to the latest GA Take via CPUSE for online and offline use. And you even can download this take for legacy install. This is really a big win.
For every other take of the JHFA you still have to open a service request. This seems to be acceptable for me.
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