Live Blog: i V5R4 to i 6.1 Upgrade: Applying License Keys and Converting Objects (Part 6)

This is part six of my live blog on updating an i5/OS V5R4 machine to i 6.1. You can view all the posts for this upgrade by clicking here.

PTFs have been applied on our target system. We again verified this through GO LICPGM, Option 50 (Display history). Option 50 also told us that the Initialize System command (INZSYS) completed successfully.

We also applied all the IBM licensed program keys from IBM. These keys have to be applied for IBM products (think System i Access, BRMS, etc.) whenever you change operating systems. When the operating system is updated, all of your previous keys for IBM licensed packages are turned into temporary keys that will last (I believe) 70 days. So you don’t necessarily need to apply them at time of upgrade as my partner Scott did today. However, the installation manual has a separate task for applying the keys and since we have them, we decided to put them in now rather than later.

The keys go on quickly if you have a soft copy of the commands to apply the keys. We worked with our business partner to get a Word doc copy of all the keys. Scott copied those commands out of the Word doc and the keys are now successfully applied.

After the keys were applied, we kicked off two jobs to convert all of our existing i5/OS V5R4 objects to i 6.1 format. You run two object conversions because the first conversion takes care of all the DB2 library objects while the second conversion takes care of the AS/400 Integrated File System objects (AS/400 IFS). The commands for each of these jobs are:

  • For DB2 library objects:

STROBJCVN LIB(*ALLUSR) SUBTREE(*ALL)

  • For AS/400 IFS objects starting with the root of the IFS:

STROBJCVN LIB(*NONE) OBJ(‘/’) SUBTREE(*ALL)

We submitted these as batch jobs to the QSYSWRK subsystem. We expect the jobs to run for several hours as they will literally touch every object on the system and make sure they are ready to go on i 6.1.

At this point, we’re back in wait mode for the remaining tasks. But after the conversions complete, we’ll definitely be in the home stretch.

Will check in later.

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About Joe Hertvik

Joe is the owner of Hertvik Business Services, a service company providing written white papers, case studies, and other marketing content to computer industry companies. He is also a contributing editor for IT Jungle and has written the Admin Alert column for the past ten years. Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. Email Joe for a free quote on white papers, case studies, brochures, or other marketing materials.
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