AIX OS upgrade gone wrong

I have an AIX LPAR that is one half of a Oracle RAC cluster running over a GPFS filesystem.

The OS version in the LPAR was 5300-05-01

I ran an upgrade to 5300-07-05 (Apply only, Commit=NO and preserve old files).

The preview passed with no failures detected.

The actual upgrade failed complaining essentially that a number of required filesets at the 5.3.0.0 level were missing. I was not particulary worried as the missing filesets were products not installed on the server.

However when I ran the oslevel -s command the result was now 5300-04-CSP.

Rebooted the server to no avail. Then I decided to reject the updates. This failed because a large number of the "APPLIED" filesets were requisites for the csm.xxx.xxx filesets.

After the "REJECT" the oslevel -s now shows 5300-02-0000.

Any ideas on what I have done wrong? My one feeling is that I should have run separate updates to 5300-05-CSP, to 5300-06-CSP and to 5300-07-05.

The "oslevel -s" shows the last complete stage which is installed. If you have the machine completely at TL7 save for just one fileset (which might be at the version issued with TL6) than "oslevel -s" would display TL6.

You can get more detailed information about which fileset is causing the problem with the "instfix" command. There is a pinned thread at the top of this forum, where the process is described in detail - use "TL" instead of "ML" to get the technical level instead of the maintenance level.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Also another cool command is lppchk -v. This will tell you what fileset(s) are causing the inconsistency. Is any results appear, you have to install that fileset so yo can be at the proper TL.

Hope that helps...

Thanks for the replies - will follow up

Also, try running this:

oslevel -rl 5300-07

If your system knows what filesets are part of "5300-07" level, it will show you which filesets are lacking. This saved me recently when I tried to go to TL8 but it was saying 5300-07-xxx. I ran this and found I was only missing one fileset. After I installed the missing fileset, it reported TL8 like I was expecting.

oslevel -rl 5300-07 This will show you the missing filesets

If you have a System with access to the WEB setup and use SUMA to down load all you need for the update. SUMA can be used to find the missing filesets and also any thing else you will require to install the rest of the filesets you need. Most of the time it is just a requirement that is missing.

Don't worry as long as you can find the correct missing filesets you can just do a update all again to fix this.

Make sure to always take a mksysb before and after the upgrade to make sure of recovery to any point

Other useful commands

smitty suma
lppchk -f