Packaging emergency fixes

You can package your own emergency fix as well as install fixes from IBM®.

Before you begin

To package your own emergency fix, you must create the archives to be uploaded and used for installing maintenance to instances. To add content to the catalog, you must be assigned the Create new catalog content permission or the Workload resources administration role with Full permission. When you create your emergency fix, be aware that all emergency fixes must be less than 2 GB. If an archive file exceeds this limit, the upload fails.

About this task

Emergency fixes provide you with a powerful tool to run a maintenance package or script against existing virtual system instances, classic virtual system instances and virtual application instances. When you package an emergency fix, you must include the following artifacts:
  • A script to install the fix.
  • An XML file to provide specific information about the fix to IBM Cloud Pak Software. The file must be in the root directory of the archive.
Note:
  • Emergency fixes for transformers are not currently supported.
  • You can update plug-in lifecycle scripts by using the maintenance operation on the Instance Console.
  • If you do not want the WebSphere Application Server instance to restart when the emergency fix is applied, you can add an extendedattributes.json file with the iwd_stop_services_before_efix attribute set to false to the emergency fix archive file. Add this file to the root directory in the emergency fix archive file, not a subdirectory. For more information about using extendedattributes.json, see the Related reference.

Procedure

  1. Create a script or module to run on your virtual system instance, classic virtual system instance or virtual application instance.
    This script can be used to perform a wide variety of tasks on your virtual system instance or classic virtual system instance or to update the lifecycle scripts on your virtual application instance. Although designed for maintenance purposes, you can use this packaging to run custom scripts or modules. When you design your script, each emergency fix must be less than 2 GB. Scripts for a classic virtual system instance can be run only once.
  2. Create a service.xml file for your fix.
    For more information about configuring emergency fixes with the service.xml file, see the related links.
  3. Package your files for the emergency fix into an archive that you can upload to the system
    The archive must include the following items:
    • The service.xml file.
    • The script that you created to deploy the fix.
    • Any other artifacts that are required for deploying the fix.

    The following archive formats are supported: .zip, .tgz, and .tar.gz.

    Important: The emergency fix name must be in ASCII characters.

Results

After you complete these packaging steps, you can upload the resulting archive file to add your custom emergency fix to the catalog.