SafeNet/i Upgrade Recovery Procedures

SafeNet/i is closely integrated with your installed IBM i/OS operating system from IBM. Care must be taken when doing software upgrades to make sure that your system is fully operable when any failures occur during an upgrade. To prevent failures, it is very important that you follow the upgrade instructions to the exact letter .... no shortcuts!

If a failure does occur, please contact Kisco Information Systems right away by both phone and by email. We monitor both, but sometimes we will get an email before we can access our phone system and sending via both methods will guarantee the best possible response.

When you contact us, we will need documentation on what has happened that is causing the failure. If you have an error message, try not to respond to it until you have conferred with us. If this is not possible, try to determine the problem by checking the error message and associated messages in the joblog to see if you can find the problem and correct it. If you can do this, and then take a retry option to the error condition, that will be your best recovery. If a retry is not a good option, then you can try an ignore option, but only if you have been unable to contact Kisco and need to move forward with your processing. Sometimes, just ignoring the error will allow your upgrade to finish. If you get repeated errors following an ignore, it is probably not a good idea to continue ignoring the errors and a cancellation is probably called for at that point.

If you get past an error situation, Kisco will still want to know what happened and make sure that your upgraded installation is still good. So, in all cases where there has been a problem, please be sure to generate a detailed joblog for the upgrade process. You can do this by running the following command as soon as your terminal returns to an IBM i/OS command line:

DSPJOBLOG OUTPUT(*PRINT)

If you are unable to recover the upgrade install process and it must be cancelled, do not attempt to repeat the install process again! Doing so could put your system in danger of loosing your complete SafeNet/i setup and configuration and will probably severly complicate your recovery process from the issue you have experienced.

To recover an upgrade process that had to be cancelled, you must first restore the old version of SafeNet/i back to where it was prior to starting the upgrade.

One of the first actions taken by the upgrade install process, after checking to make sure that the conditions for the upgrade have been met, is to save your prior version install library (PCSECLIB) into an IBM i/OS save-file in a special library named PCSECOLD on your system. The save-file is named SAVF. To restore your prior version, check this save-file to make sure that it contains your old version. If you have verified this, then you can restore your prior version while your system is still in a restricted state, by running the following command:

RSTOBJ OBJ(*ALL) SAVLIB(PCSECLIB) DEV(*SAVF)
SAVF(PCSECOLD/SAVF) MBROPT(*ALL) ALWOBJDIF(*ALL)

When the application library has been restored, then you need to determine if the data files library also needs to be recovered. Check your system for the presence of a library named PCSECOLDD. Note that there may be two libraries on your system with similar names: PCSECOLD and PCSECOLDD. It is the latter that you are looking for. If you find this library, check the contents to make sure that it is from the current upgrade and not a leftover library from an earlier upgrade. You can check by looking at the records in the TRAPOD file, they will have a date and time stamp in them at the end of each record. If this file is current, then you will need to do the following:

DLTLIB LIB(PCSECDTA)

RNMOBJ OBJ(QSYS/PCSECOLDD) OBJTYPE(*LIB) NEWOBJ(PCSECDTA)

This process will restore the SafeNet/i data file library.

Before you resume normal operations, you must check the logging setting in the CHGSPCSET command. Add library PCSECLIB to your session library list (ADDLIBLE PCSECLIB) and then prompt the CHGSPCSET command using the F4 function key. Check the first parameter value (LOGALL). If it is set to *NONE, change it back to the correct setting for your installation.

If you are recovering from an unattended upgrade, you should check your IPL Attributes using the CHGIPLA command. The pre-upgrade process will change the STRTCP (Start TCP/IP) setting to *NO. Following a successful unattended upgrade, if you had it set to *YES then our upgrade process would have changed it back to your normal setting. If the upgrade failed, this may not have been done. We recommend that you check this setting before putting your system back into normal use.

Once the old version has been restored, you can either try starting another upgrade or wait until you have been able to work through the issues with support staff at Kisco Information Systems. If you decide to wait, you should reactivate SafeNet/i before you resume normal operations on your system.