UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Does anyone know any gotcha's on upgrading AIX from 5.1 to 5.3? Any interim steps on needs to do or ???

First of all: mksysb and savevg

1)mksysb
2)backing up of filesystems onto the tsm server.

good luck!

I did almost 60 AIX 5.1 to 5.3 upgrades for a contract this summer. A couple things I remember.

1. Be sure your firmware is up to date. There are plenty of IBM server models where firmware from a year or two ago works fine for 5.1 but if you upgrade to 5.3 without updating the firmware first it won't boot.

2. If you're going to 5.3, TL4, SP3 there is an issue with the boot image size being too big. You need to go to the boot prom and use setenv real-base c00000 to increase the memory allocation. See AIX 5.3 installation tips, Doc Number 2428, Feb. 7, 2006 from IBM for details.

3. You may have to remove docsearch lpps because they don't have replacements in 5.3 so you'll have old 5.1 versions laying around after the upgrade. No big deal, but oslevel will incorrectly show you are downlevel because of the old lpps if you don't. Details of that issue are in the same doc as I listed in #2.

Good luck.

Ralph