Version 1.0.6.0 release notes (February 2018)

What's new

Upgrading

• Upgrades are now completed in parallel across nodes, resulting in significant time savings.
• When you upgrade using the apupgrade program, IAS checks to ensure that all nodes in the cluster are available before beginning the upgrade.
• Node type firmware is now automatically upgraded by the apupgrade program.
• Upgrades will now automatically attempt to update the firmware for the IAS terminal server, fabric switches, power distribution units, and nodes. Node firmware is of particular importance for IAS Version 1.0.6.0, as the firmware contains the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerability fixes. Nodes on existing IAS systems are now upgraded to the RedHat OS 7.4 operating system, which contains the latest kernel changes, enhancements, and security fixes (including for Spectre and Meltdown).
• When you upgrade using the apupgrade program, feedback on your progress is now provided in real-time instead of at the end of the process.
• When you upgrade using the apupgrade program and you specify the --upgrade-details parameter, any previous upgrades to the same version are detected and you will receive a report on previous upgrade attempt.
• When IAS needs to restart during an upgrade, the procedure will automatically resume upon reboot and continue logging to the same log file. You no longer need to manually resume the upgrade procedure.
• The svsutils and pfscfg software components are now automatically upgraded by the apupgrade program.

Backup and restore

• The db_backup command now creates the path you specify with the -path parameter automatically if it doesn't already exist.
• You no longer need to specify the -logpath parameter when running the db_restore command, as the log file path is now created automatically.

DSX

If you need to report a problem with using DSX on IAS, you can now collect related diagnostics by running the following command:

apdiag collect --set dsx_logs --node node0101 --headnode node0101

CallHome

If you have enabled the Call Home feature for problem reporting, you can now use Call Home to manually report issues not automatically sent to IBM by using one of the following methods:

• Use the CLI command:

  ap issues --open_service_request a1 a2 a3 a4 ...

  where a1, a2, a3, a4 are alert IDs.
• In the IAS web console menu, click Monitor > System > Notifications and select one or more issues. Then select Create Service Request.

Windows Active Directory Support

You can now integrate IAS with Microsoft Active Directory for platform user authentication. See Configuring Windows Active Directory for platform authentication.

Resolved issues

• When all host names are removed from a host's network configuration, the operation to remove them from the /etc/hosts file failed. This issue has been fixed.
• During network configuration, extraneous output sometimes appears. This distracting output has been removed.
• In some instances, the upgrade of the ap-comms RPM was failing during installation, leaving the RPM in a half-installed state. This issue has been fixed.
• IAS now only successfully authenticates users that have been explicitly provided access to the system by the platform administrator using the usermod option of the /opt/ibm/appliance/platform/ldap/bin/ap_external_ldap.pl command. In previous versions of IAS, a platform user with a group id of 2001 or 2002 was able to authenticate to IAS from the external LDAP server even without access explicitly granted by the administrator.

Known issues

• When running the sys_hw_check command, the configuration reports as FAIL.
  Symptoms:

  • The node is not pingable after the firmware upgrade completed using apupgrade.
  • No console output is received from the FSP console port.

  When apupgrade is resumed once the nodes restart, the nodes are not reachable and apupgrade fails.

  Workaround:

  1. Use the sys_hw_util command to power-off the node by disabling the PDU ports for the problematic node. For example:

     sys_hw_util power --off -t node0103 sys_hw_util power --on -t node0103

  2. Wait about 15 minutes, then resume apupgrade.
• FSP firmware update may fail on some nodes without any notification.
  To detect this issue, run ap hw and take note of FSP FW (right-most FW column on rows named Compute Node) versions. If firmware shows BELOW compared to the other firmware versions of the other FSPs, then:

  1. Shut down the DB and GPFS and other services gracefully.
  2. Run

     sys_hw_config
             -F node --fsp -t node010x --force-firmware

  3. Run

     sys_hw_check node -t
             node010x

     and confirm that everything passes with no aboves or belows.
  4. Bring system back Online.

  Note: After upgrade to 1.0.6.0, that FW field should show FW860.42 (SV860_138)

• When changing or applying a network configuration, the IAS system needs to be stopped. Once the configuration is updated, the application can be brought up again immediately. The outage is approximately 5 minutes plus an additional 2 minutes per node. While there is no workaround, you can minimize the downtime on a system which is moving or having new addresses applied: enter all the data and then stop the database before selecting Save and Apply from apnetSetup (or the apSetup network submenu).
• NFS mounts currently do not reliably persist on an IAS node. If you try to configure an NFS mount on a node, and then you are later forced to disable the node, you need to reboot and then re-enable that node to the database cluster. The process of re-enabling will cause NFS to be unmounted. There is no current workaround.