Re: Upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4 this weekend

UPDATE -

After my last posting on Friday, indicating that we would postpone, I
received word from the main plant that they had already scheduled downtime
or reduced staff for Saturday, and that it might be several more months
until there was an opportunity to do it again came up. I tried to argue that
it was not a good weekend to do it, and that we weren't completely ready,
only to be told that if possible, it needed to happen now. So, I reluctantly
agreed, and spent the rest of the day feverishly reading everything I could
find, loading PTFs and doing cleanup.

Here's what happened:

Friday afternoon I loaded all the CDs into an Image Catalog

Friday night I shutdown the system and did a full system backup.

Saturday morning 8am, I did some additional backups and cleanup, then
(nervously) started the install (first time) around 11am. System hung with
C6004001. Called IBM, found out we were missing two TPFs MF40281 & MF40278
which are required for the Image Catalog load. Actually, I had both of
these, but they werent permanently applied.

Saturday afternoon 2pm - restarted the Install. Everything went fine until
it got to installing the Licensed Programs. It failed loading QUSRSYS, error
messages CPF3C83 and CPF3D95 in joblog. 4pm, second call to IBM. Worked thru
the issue which involved deleting an Exit Point from QIBM_QSY_CERT_APPS and
restarting the Licensed program install.

Saturday afternoon 5pm - another issue with Licensed program install. This
time it was with Extended Base Support and numerous errors to go along with
it. To make matters worse, apparrently I scratched CD B29MM_03 when
inserting it into the CD drive and made portions of it unreadable. So, I ran
to Best Buy and bought a SkipDr disc repair kit. Remarkably/luckily it
worked! However, I still couldn't get Extended Base Support to load. Third
call to IBM. It would appear that during the initial attempt to load this
LICPGM, it left some files in an opne/corrupted state. We IPLed the system
and tried to load again, this time successful!

Saturday evening 7pm - system appears to be stable, start downloading V5R4
ptfs, run some necesarry jobs and go home.

Sunday afternoon 1pm - apply PTFs, time changed successfully after PTF
install and IPL.

The rest of the Sunday was spent testing and verifying that everything
worked.

The only other major issue I had was with Robot/Autotune, which had to be
completely reinstalled.

All things considered, it wasn't too bad. I lost about 4-5 hours due to the
3 issues. Of those, two were my fault (if you count the CD scratch), and one
was an IBM problem. All total, I spent 3-5 hours Friday preparing, 10 hours
Saturday installing, 5 hours Sunday installing PTFs and testing. Total 18-20
hours give or take an hour or 2.

As of this writing (9:40am) Monday, I've only had one issue. It was due to a
Logical file that was corrupt and needed to be re-built/compiled.