AIX Maintenance Strategies

Maintaining currency of the operating system has always been a time consuming chore for system administrators, and one that has been often overlooked to great detriment to uptime and even careers.

There is nothing worse than explaining to management that the root cause of the the latest system crash is the result of a known bug and that a patch was released two weeks ago.

Starting this year, IBM has changed their AIX maintenance strategy - and this is a change for the better. It will allow for a high level of automation in operating system maintenance and provide critical fix notification, making the task much easier for system administrators.

It is also somewhat reminicent of a previous era. Those who remember the days of FIXDIST might experience deja vu.

So lets start with the basics. IBM will continue to develop a release major OS releases as they have in the past, except that it will be done in a more collaborative way with ISVs and strategic software vendors. The hope is that it will no longer take 6 months for a major software vendor, like Oracle, to support the next OS release.

Next, maintenance levels are out. No longer will we have to frequently check the IBM support website to find out what is the latest version. The new term, "technology levels" are more accuate, since IBM will be incorporating more than just fixes in technology levels.

The will be released on a predictable schedule, twice a year, allowing for planning, testing and scheduled installations. The first half technology level are smaller since they are restricted
to hardware features and enablement, and software service. Second half technology levels also includes new software features, and will be a larger release.

Between regular technology levels, IBM will release service packs, PTFs that are grouped together for easier identification. These fixes will be for highly pervasive, critical, or security related issues and will be released ever 4-6 weeks between technology levels.

Applying the latest level of available updates will move the system to the latest service pack. To see which service pack is currently installed, we have a new command switch: "oslevel -s" . The output for a server/LPAR with AIX 5.3, technology level 4, service pack 2 installed would be:

# oslevel -s
5300-04-02

Like maintenance levels, service packs are cumulative, so if service pack 4 is installed, all of the previous critical fixes from service packs 1 through 3 will also be installed.

As you might have guessed, this also means the end of "critical fix packs".

Something completely new is the concluding service pack, which will identify the last service pack on a technology level The CSP will contain fixes for highly pervasive, critical, or security related issues, just like an SP, but it may also contain fixes from the newly released technology level that are highly pervasive, critical, or security related.

The CSP will be available shortly after a new technology level is released. As an example, if technology level 5300-04 is released, the CSP for 5300-03, will be available 4-6 weeks later.

It will have a specific level identifier of "CSP", so the "oslevel -s" command output would be:

# oslevel -s
5300-03-CSP