100% remove patches on AIX 5.1

[peteru]

Hello,

If I want to install patches on a AIX 5.1 system, can I be sure that this patches can be removed 100% after installation?

Someone else installed some patches on the system. How can I verify which patches are installed?

Thanks a lot,
Peter

 

[bi]

Question 1: When you install the patches, make the following changes to smitty's default: Change "Commit softwre update?" to NO. Change "Save replaced files?" to YES. The patches will appear as Applied. They will still be used by the OS uness you remove them.

Question 2: If there is an APAR that was installed and you know the number of the APAR, you can run instfix -i | grep <APAR number>.

You also can run instfix -i | grep ML to see which of the ML are installed. If only some of a ML is installed, you can run instfix -ick <ML name, 5200-04_AIX_ML, for example> | grep :-: to find out what is missing on your system for that ML.

NOTE: Believe it or not, we have had problems with some applications (DB2, notably) not recognizing patches or MLs that are in an applied state, rather than a committed state. Someone at IBM told me he saw that once 8 years ago.

 

[peteru]

Do I need to be root user for that ?

Can I compare two system, regards the installation of patches, using instfix -ick > file and compare the files?

 

[bi]

Hmmm.

Well, you could have tried it as a non-root user, but I'll give you the answer anyway:

You do not need to be root to run instfix.

You do need root privileges to install software.