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AIX 7.3 Installation Tips

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This document contains tips for successful installation of AIX 7.3 and is updated as new tips become available.
Last Update: 25 May 2022
Technology Levels and Service Packs mentioned in this document, when available, can be obtained from Fix Central at:
https://www.ibm.com/support/fixcentral

General Recommendations

Review the AIX 7.3 Release Notes for system requirements, limitations, and other information vital to successful installation.
The AIX installation DVDs and the level of AIX preinstalled on new systems might not contain the latest fixes available. Missing fixes might be critical to the proper operation of your system. Update these systems to a current service pack level from Fix Central.

When you update to a new Technology Level (TL), it is good practice to first update the bos.rte.install file set in a separate installation session.

With certain combinations of updates, the update process might have to be run a second time in order to apply all updates in a package. Checking the output of the 'oslevel -r' and 'oslevel -s' commands for the expected values after an update is recommended. Until the update is run a second time, the output of the oslevel command might not indicate that the package is fully installed.

The compare_report command, which is documented in the AIX Commands Reference, can be used to determine which available updates contain fixes not present on your system.

Any library or executable file that is updated by an interim fix (emgr) or service update, which is in use by an active process, is not reflected in that process until it is restarted. In addition, any process that is using a library and does a dlopen() of the same library after the library is updated, could experience inconsistencies.

Commit all applied updates before you upgrade your system to a new service pack or technology level. If you use workload partitions (WPARs), commit all applied updates in the WPARs before you update the global LPAR.

20 May 2022 - Updated 25 May 2022

Firewall Changes Might Be Needed For Fix Retrieval

IBM is planning to implement infrastructure improvements to electronic fix distribution in early June.

Public internet IP address and hostnames are changing for the IBM servers that support internet delivery of fixes and updates for customer system's software, hardware, and operating system.

This change pertains to all operating systems supported by IBM Electronic Fix Distribution (EFD) / IBM Fix Central system.

Customer action might be required to ensure uninterrupted fix delivery services.

See the full bulletin for details.

Service Update Management Assistant (SUMA) is not affected by this change.

10 December 2021

Secure Boot failure with ntpd

Secure Boot checks fail for 7300-00-01-2148 LPARs configured to run ntp4.  Failed boots display this message:
Secure boot: Signature verification failed for /usr/sbin/xntpd
This issue can be worked around by deleting the erroneous entry from the Trusted Signature Database (TSD) by running:
trustchk -d /usr/sbin/ntp4/ntpd4
If you are already hitting this problem, then you need to reduce your Secure Boot policy to allow boot.  Then, delete the TSD entry, set the Secure Boot policy back to a level of 2 or less, and boot one more time.

Limitations with Java8.jre 8.0.0.635

Java 8 32-bit SR6FP35 (VRMF 8.0.0.635) might not load properly on AIX 7.3.
When you migrate from AIX 7.2 to AIX 7.3, if the logical partition has Java 8 32-bit SR6FP35 (VRMF 8.0.0.635) installed, you must upgrade the Java version to a later level that can be downloaded from the Java SDK on AIX page.
If a newer version is not available, Java 8 32-bit SR6FP30 (VRMF 8.0.0.630) images are provided on the AIX 7.3 Expansion Pack.  You can force-install these Java images to revert to an earlier version that does not have the loading issues.

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Document Information

Modified date:
24 May 2022

UID

ibm16513320

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