AS/400 V4R4 to V5Rx -- Overly Difficult?

[jrjuiliano]

Hi all,

I was reading somewhere that upgrading to V5 is a lot more difficult than previous installations of the OS/400 system.

Can anyone shed some light on that? Any specific places to check for what I would need to do in order to upgrade more smoothly?

Thanks. J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group

 

[iSeriesCodePoet]

We are still at V4R5. But I have heard that there has been some problems. But mostly it has gone smooth.

IBM has some resources on upgrading. I lost my email that I had that list on. I will see if I can find it.

One other resource is Midrange.com. Look in their archives for V5R1 upgrades. Mike Wills
AS400 Programmer


Please, if you find my post useful, let me know.

 

[jrjuiliano]

Thanks, Koldark... I'll check out Midrange. Luckily I still have a few months to a year to get this together. No sense in rushing it at the last moment! J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group

 

[jnew1999]

Hi Jr., We are cuurently on V4R5 and are being "forced" into this upgrade. Do you have any Displaywrite in any of your programs? Do any of your users use displaywrite to merge documents? Watch out because V5xx does not support it. We are having to spend thousands on workarounds for this issue.
Good Luck jnew1999

 

[jrjuiliano]

jnew1999,

Luckily, no we don't support Displaywrite. And from what you are saying, that just stinks...

We only use the AS/400 with an application provider and for Query/400. The app vendor says that the upgrade works. Of course, they don't provide help or details in advance unless we fork out the ca$h. So I get to do my research, make a full backup and "play" with it to get it to work.

I DID find out that they have an automatic installation feature with this version, which is good. I only need to worry about TCP/IP connectivity and Client Access Express and that's about it.

Thanks for the tip... J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group

 

[headyman]

We did have a couple of issues with an upgrade from 4.4 to 5.1. The first was that we needed to convert a large number of objects. This was reported to IBM and the following was added to PSP.

10. 02/01/08 On the first use of database files after upgrading to Version 5 Release 1.0, conversions occur to the database file objects. To avoid conversion overhead and concurrency considerations during production, consider applying PTF SI02506 and scheduling STROBJCVN LIB(library-name) OBJTYPE(*FILE) for each of your production libraries immediately after the upgrade. If you have more than 1 production library, schedule multiple jobs to run at the same time. For information on concurrency issues, see APARs SE03318 and SE03319. This has been updated in the incompatibilities for Version 5 Release 1.0 Memo to Users, (II12556)in English only.

There is also a parameter change that appears to have caused some problems for us. The way that dead gateway processing is handled is different in 5.1. You should check this parmeter in TCP configuration. Please let me know if you would like futher info on any of this.
Cheers
Jon

 

[jrjuiliano]

headyman. Thanks for the heads up. I have no idea how many objects will need to be converted. It's pretty much just the OS and the lib files from our application provider.

Looks like it would be a good idea to make sure I have the latest cumulative package before I start anything.

Thanks again. J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group