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A screen a story – Not our problem anymore

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Rudi van Helvoirt
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Last week I ran into an issue, which did teach me something new about the command WRKPRB.

After checking a test LPAR after having applied the latest group PTFs for IBM i 7.4, I noticed the following when checking the apply:

When looking at the joblog of QSYSCOMM1 spoolfiles were being created:

When looking at the output, several QPCSMPRT spoolfiles were created, which did not tell me much to be honest.

When running the command WRKPRB option 8 allows you to work with the problem and to report it to IBM using option 2. The attempt to report the problem to IBM was based on the fact that in the past reporting problems to IBM resulted in a PTF to be downloaded. That will only happen if it is a known problem for which a PTF is already available. When a solution is not available a generic cover letter was send back by IBM: II12302 – INFO APAR FOR FFDC AUTO RESPONSE . This contained the information on how to to open a PMR, which is now called a Case.

The outcome of my attempt to report this problem, resulted in the message “Error occurred while processing request”. So reporting a problem lead to another problem! In order to get to the bottom of this I opened two IBM cases using the web link https://www.ibm.com/mysupport/s/my-cases.

The Report to IBM case resulted in a link to the document:

Configuration Instructions for Electronic Customer Support (ECS) and Electronic Service Agent (ESA) for IBM i

In there the following section explains why reporting the problem no longer works:

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Comments

2 responses to “A screen a story – Not our problem anymore”

  1. Jozsef Torok avatar
    Jozsef Torok

    Hi Rudi,

    Nice article on the [non]-reporting of problems via WRKPRB. I feel your pain.

    As an aside, we encountered the same issue early October with mutliple problems logged for QCLCLCPR (MSGCPI93B0) when applying a bunch of new IBM i 7.4 PTFs on our first test system. Manually logged a case with IBM and was initially told that this looked liked a one-off situation. But sure enough, applying the same PTFs on our second test system the same occurred. After updating IBM support, it turns out another customer had reported the same issue. From the second lot of dump data supplied to IBM, it turns out the culprit is 5770SS1-SI80442. It is the PTF’s exit program that has the issue, but the PTF exception handling does complete the PTF install. And has no impact on the OS.
    So now waiting for an update where I suspect this PTF will be marked as a PTF in error, with a fixing PTF to be published.
    To be fair I guess IBM Support was correct in saying this was a one-off situation, but could be a bit disconcerting for some customers.

    Thanks Rudi,
    Jozsef

    Reply
  2. jane Youens avatar
    jane Youens

    Very Good Article

    Reply

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