Q1 Have AIX 4.3.3 installed and 2 each 9GB hard drives to play with. Trying to install AIX upgrade 4330011.tgz Used SMIT logical volume manager to increase hd3 to 501 logical partitions which should be about 8GB total size. hd3 is mounted on /tmp. CDROM containing 4330011.tgz mounted successfully. Try to copy the .tgz file to /tmp with the following command: cp 4330011.tgz /tmp and I get the error message: There is not enough space in the file system. A1 > Used SMIT logical volume manager to increase hd3 to 501 logical > partitions which should be about 8GB total size. hd3 is mounted on > /tmp. 501 logical partitions would give you about 8GB if the partition size is 16MB. If the partition size is only 4MB (a fairly typical value for AIX), then you'll have a 2GB logical volume. Where did the 4330011.tgz file come from, and what size is it? The 4330011.tar.gz file from IBM is 271,108,993 bytes, so even a 2GB logical volume should be plenty big enough. My preference is to do the "gunzip" step before writing the CD-ROM, then extracting the contents of the tarball to your AIX space -- you'll need about 400MB of free space for the contents of the 4330011.tar archive. I wouldn't mount hd3 over /tmp, either, I'd make another mount point (/mnt/maint, for example) and mount hd3 there. IBM recommends that you mount your filesystem at /usr/sys/inst.images, see https://techsupport.services.ibm.com/server/mlfixes/43/11/00to11.html for details. Rick Ekblaw A2 > The 4330011.tar.gz file from IBM > is 271,108,993 bytes, so even a 2GB logical volume should be plenty big > enough. 264MB is ~1/8 of 2GB ^__^ A3 it is very easy to expand a filesystem and the underlying logical volume with a single command. ("chfs -a size= /"). The actual size will be rounded to full logical partitions. With the standard parameters a LP will be 16 MB on 9G disks. The whole disk will be divided in less or equal 1014 LPs and all disks in a volume group *must* share their LP size. So you cannot add a 18GB drive to a rootvg created on a 4GB disk (without altering TFACTOR) for e.g. But!!! It may be hard to impossible to shrink a filesystem to free up diskspace for expanding another filesystem. For normal usage a 1 or 2 GB /tmp fs is wasted. So it is best practice to create another temporary filesystem through smit(ty) and simply delete it afterwards. If you mount your temporary filesystem to /usr/sys/inst.images smit(ty) will automatically find it. Else you must point smit(ty) to the used directory. This is in other words what Rick wrote. All this applies to all versions of AIX and is machine independand. TFACTOR can be changed only for AIX 4.3 or newer. -- Uli A4 OK......I restarted from scratch. I formatted both disks and installed AIX 4.3.3 and have the machine on line using this one as a terminal. Rick: The upgrade file (I got from you on a CD) is 4330011.tar and 381MB. I think I have a great lack of understanding how AIX filesystems work. My problem is that I think in terms of DOS and it doesn't apply in the same manner. For example the slash (/) in DOS means you are going to see the contents of the whole partiton, but in AIX......it doesn' t mean that at all. Also, when Rick tells me to not mount hd3 over /tmp but to make another mount point (which I did...../mnt/timtemp) and mount hd3 there, I failed miserably. When I tried to use smit to unmount hd3, it replies that the resource is busy. A5 Tim Knight/CT wrote: > I think I have a great lack of understanding how AIX filesystems work. > My problem is that I think in terms of DOS and it doesn't apply in the > same manner. Tim, I'll try to explain the basics in DOS-like terms to help you out. I'll take some liberties that would make Uli and other "True Blue" AIX folks want to scream because important details will be left out or glossed over, but you can't write the "For Dummies" book and the "Technical Reference Guide" for the same audience. AIX wants to refer to your physical hard drives as hdisk0, hdisk1, etc., similar to how your PC BIOS/DOS interface refers to the first hard drive as x'80', then x'81', x'82', etc (we're at the FDISK stage right now, no drive letters yet). In AIX, you create a new volume group or add the physical hard drive to an existing volume group (In DOS, you run FDISK and make a primary or extended partition or partitions). The AIX equivalent of a DOS partition is the logical volume, once the physical hard drive is assigned to a volume group you can create one or more logical volumes on the drive. In DOS, after you create the partition(s) using FDISK, you reboot and DOS assigns drive letters to the partition(s). In AIX, you create a filesystem in the logical volume. When you create (or extend) a filesystem using SMIT(ty), the equivalent of a DOS format is performed automatically, so at this point the DOS step would be to format the partition. OK, so now the DOS drive (C:, for example) is ready to have files written to it. Not so for AIX, the filesystem must be mounted at a mount point before it is available for reading/writing. A mount point is a directory, you can create it yourself or let SMIT(ty) help you do it, but here's a critical point: Since it is a directory, you can put files there when the filesystem is not mounted, but those files will not be visible when you mount the filesystem at the mount point! This confuses the heck out of non-Unix users and new AIX administrators, which is why many installations create a directory called /mnt (short for "mount"), and then create directories under mnt for each device and "optional" filesystem that might be used, and *never* put files in those directories. Required filesystems get mounted at system startup, so manual mounting and unmounting is not needed. So you wind up with directories like /mnt/cdrom (or sometimes just /cdrom), /mnt/patches, /mnt/remotefilesystem, etc. What about that "busy" message on the umount? If any file in a filesystem is open, AIX will not allow you to unmount that filesystem (the system is trying to protect your filesystem). One common "open" file situation is having a terminal session running with the current directory set to somewhere inside the filesystem. Another common "gotcha" is running a daemon that has a log file inside the filesystem. If you are going to have these 2 9GB drives attached all of the time, I'd suggest having both of them in the rootvg volume group (you could have 1 in rootvg and the other in another volume group, but that adds a level of complication that you probably want to avoid). Your fresh AIX 4.3.3 install probably only used one drive (hdisk0), so go ahead and add hdisk1 to rootvg using SMIT(ty). You'll have lots of unused space in rootvg, so make a logical volume of a reasonable size (say, 800MB) and make a filesystem in that logical volume -- use SMIT(ty) for this task, too. Then mount that filesystem at /usr/sys/inst.images, apply the maintenance level like IBM wants, and you should be all set. After everything is done, you could (and probably should) unmount the filesystem until you have more patches to apply. You could even delete the logical volume and reclaim the space if you wanted to practice your filesystem maintenance procedures. Rick Ekblaw A6 Type "df -k" and you'll see how much disk space is free on all mounted filesystems in kilobytes. So you will see, if "/usr/sys/inst.images" is a separate filesystem or you only have "/usr/sys/inst.images" is a directory in the /usr filesystem (which can be used as mountpoint). Uli FROM IBM AIX 4300-11 maintenance package Recommended maintenance for AIX 4.3.3 The designation 4330-11 indicates that this package updates AIX 4.3.3 from base level (no maintenance level) to maintenance level 11 (4330-11). IBM recommends that all customers install the latest available maintenace package for their AIX release. To determine if AIX 4330-11 is already installed on your system, run the following command: oslevel -r General description This package contains code corrections for the AIX operating system and many related subsystems. Unless otherwise stated, this package is released for all languages. For additional information, refer to the Package information Download and install instructions Package Released Size (Bytes) 4330011.tar.gz (See Note) 02/05/03 271,108,993 Additional space needed to extract the filesets 376,064,000 Note: IBM recommends that you create a separate file system for /usr/sys/inst.images to prevent the expansion of the /usr file system. For more information, see the Installation tips. Click on the package name above. Put the package (a tar.gz file) in /usr/sys/inst.images Extract the filesets from the package. cd /usr/sys/inst.images gzip -d -c 4330011.tar.gz | tar -xvf - Back up your system. Install the package by creating a table of contents for install to use. Then update the install subsystem itself. Run SMIT to complete the installation. inutoc /usr/sys/inst.images installp -acgXd /usr/sys/inst.images bos.rte.install smit update_all Reboot your system. This maintenance package replaces critical operating system code. Critical fixes Certain fixes released as critical fix packages may also apply to your system. Refer to Critical fixes for details and downloads. IBM INSTALLATION TIPS Always read the package information. IBM recommends that you create a separate file system for /usr/sys/inst.images to prevent the expansion of the /usr file system. Downloaded fix packages require a significant amount of disk space. By creating a separate file system, you can avoid expanding the /usr file system. Always run the inutoc command to ensure the installation subsystem will recognize the new fix packages you download. The most common installation procedure is to use smit update_all For the INPUT device / directory field, specify /usr/sys/inst.images. You may wish to retain this package for future use. When you install additional operating system software you will want to use this package to bring the additional software up to this maintenance level.