Power Systems Tricks and Tips from Gareth Coates

Edit: Still great information

Originally posted October 6, 2020 on AIXchange

IBMer Gareth Coates maintains a blog covering topics from NIC speed in AIX to processor compatibility modes on POWER9, scripts like sumcol, duvg and dfvg and much more.

IBMer Gareth Coates maintains a blog called Tricks of the Power Masters.

As of this writing, Gareth’s blog has 25 entries covering everything from NIC speed in AIX® to processor compatibility modes on POWER9® systems to scripts like sumcol, duvg and dfvg and much more.

A recent post explains what to do if the HMC displays the wrong OS level (in an LPAR) after an upgrade.

After upgrading the operating system in an LPAR on an IBM Power System, the HMC does not always notice that there has been a change. This page will show you how to correct this and also has a script to find the O/S versions of all LPARs on all systems managed by an HMC.

Note: a Resource Monitoring and Control (RMC) connection between the HMC and the LPAR is required to be able to see the O/S version.

Read on and you’ll learn about the –osrefresh flag on the lssyscfg command:

hscroot@hmc16:~> lssyscfg -m P9-S922-amber -r lpar -F os_version –osrefresh –filter lpar_names=vm220-a74b3c63-0000002e

AIX 7.2 7200-04-02-2028

The HMC has refreshed its data and outputs the new version.

The next time that the page is refreshed, the GUI will now show the updated version too.

He then provides a script that updates the OS that the HMC displays:

hmcuser=hscroot@hmc16              

ssh $hmcuser ‘            

lssyscfg -r sys -F name | sort | while read server            

do            

lssyscfg -m ${server} -r lpar –osrefresh -F name,os_version| sed -e s/^/${server},/            

echo            

done            



Take a moment and read the whole thing; it makes more sense in its entirety. Then spend some time going through Gareth’s other entries. I’m sure you’ll learn something new.