Live Blog: Upgrading i V5R4 to i 6.1: Starting the Upgrade (Part 2)

This is part two 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.

Kicking off the upgrade is relatively easy. If you follow IBM’s installation redbook, you kick off the upgrade with a Power Down System command (PWRDWNSYS) to IPL the system from a specific IPL source.

For many people, you IPL and load the software from DVD, which means your PWRDWNSYS command will look lke this:

PWRDWNSYS OPTION(*IMMED) RESTART(*YES) IPLSRC(D)

In our case, we are installing from image catalog, so our PWRDWNSYS statement will look like this:

PWRDWNSYS OPTION(*IMMED) RESTART(*YES) IPLSRC(*IMGCLG) IMGCLG(catalog-name)

The mental issue I ran into here was what to put into the image catalog name parameter (IMGCLG). I have always looked at image catalog directories the same way I looked at DVD directories, through my optical device. The mistake I made was in thinking that I had to put the name of my optical device in the IMGCLG parameter rather than the image catalog name itself.

When I tried to run the PWRDWNSYS command with the device name in IMGCLG, the command tried to verify the device as an installation image catalog and failed. This confused me and it took me about 20 minutes to figure out what the correct name of my install image catalog was. I did that by running the following Work with Objects command (WRKOBJ) to show me all the image catalog objects on the system.

WRKOBJ OBJ(*ALL/*ALL) OBJTYPE(*IMGCLG)

This showed me all my image catalogs. I picked out the right name, put it in my PWRDWNSYS statement and the upgrade was off and running. I figure I lost about 20 minutes on the upgrade due to this.

This detour taught me that PWRDWNSYS will verify that it is pointing to valid upgrade media before it launches an IPL to upgrade the system. That’s a comfort because it means I don’t have to worry about launching an upgrade with an non-upgrade image file. The system has my back.

The upgrade is now running and I’m waiting for the next step. Good thing I have my blog and my Nook to keep me company.

***************************************************

Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.