AIX Patches and Maintenance

AIX Patches and Maintenance

Question: Discuss your strategy for applying and committing maintenanceAnswer: • A prudent administrator will generally apply fixes first if those fixes have never been used before in the environment.• After an evaluation period, the fixes can be committed.• Subsequent installations of those fixes on other machines can then be committed.• If these fixes are related to the base OS, a mksysb should be created first.

Question: What are the AIX Maintenance Levels and how do they differ from normal fixes?Answer: AIX Maintenance Levels are similar to an NT service pack. They are generally considered safe to install “all at once”. Normal AIX fix collections may or may not contain fixes that could interfere with each other; however, maintenance levels are generally considered safe.


Question: Describe the difference between a PTF, and APAR, and a maintenance level.Answer: An APAR is a specific patch that may update one or more filesets. A PTF is an IBM term for a collection of APARs commonly shipped together as a common file set update. A maintenance level is a collection of APARs (also generally ordered as an APAR).

Question: Your machine is running AIX 4.3.3 with maintenance level 10 applied. “oslevel” (no option) reports “4.3.2.0”. Why?Answer: There are some file sets installed that are at a level BELOW what is defined for 4.3.3.

Question: What is the difference between applying and committing an APAR?Answer: Applying it saves the old versions of the files so that you can back off the new version. Committing the APAR removes the old versions.

Question: How do you back off a committed set of patches?Answer: You have to forcibly install the base level of the affected file sets, while NOT reinstalling any prerequisites, and then re-patch back to the appropriate level.