Live Blog: Updating i V5R4 to i 6.1: Backup Issues (Part 1)

Today, my compadre Master Technician Scott and myself are updating a development i5/OS V5R4 machine to i 6.1. I am putting out occassional blog posts all day documenting our progress. You can view all the posts for this upgrade by clicking here.

Our upgrade started this morning at 4:00 AM with a full system backup. Since this is a development box, we have to kick all the Apps people off before upgrade. However, we needed to keep the box up so if a problem occurred wih our overnight end of day job runs on the applications box, the apps team could still use the development box to troubleshoot a solution.

Overnight came and went, so the backup kicked off at 4 AM. Since we were starting the upgrade at 10:00 AM, we didn’t want the machine to come back up for processing. So before the backup, we changed the System Startup system value to *NONE, so the startup program would not trigger.

We checked the backup twice: once at 6:00 AM and once at 9:15 AM to make sure it was running correctly.

When I opened the system console at 10:00 AM after the backup completed, the system was up (not restricted) but there were only a handful of  subsystems available, including:

• QCTL
• QHTTPSVR
• QSYSWRK

This is an IBM i state that I’ve documented before as semi-restricted state.

Which was fine for our purposes. We just needed to insure no work was done after the backup. The fact that QSYSWRK is available would have allowed us to start up our TCP/IP interfaces if we needed to.

So with this backup and a combination of a full system backup from last Sunday and last night’s incremental backup tape, we now have two backups to turn to if a problem occurs with the upgrade.

Proceeding to upgrade. Check in later.

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