Re: SWMA, HWMA and Update Access Keys.... -- MIDRANGE-L

You will not be able to update the firmware, and eventually not be able to
apply PTFs due to incompatibility, but the system will keep running.

You will need to request a PRPQ for the firmware support only, IBM will
only sell one year at a time on that. It's a royal, class A, major PITA to
get done.

IBM does not seem to realize that the dwindling support personnel in the
field and the awful lack of experience and education/training of these
folks are driving customers away from IBM Hardware support. Last week I
had to instruct the SSR how to replace a disk unit since "he had never done
it before on an IBM i system". Did not even know how to sign in to SST.
He was trying to get SMIT to come up (AIX utility).

That said, hardware support on a single system is not too awful in price.

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects

On Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 9:52 AM Pete Helgren <pete@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I managed to get my SWMA renewed although not for RDi since I couldn't
get IBM to budge (yet) on the "after license" pricing since the SWMA had
expired (no notice...ongoing issue). In ANY case, does anyone know what
impact and expired "Update Access Key" will have on the overall system?
I don't normally purchase HWMA since I have never experienced an
unforced hardware failure and if I have a HW failure, I can usually get
support from this forum to get it resolved.

HOWEVER, the "Update Access Keys" panel does show my "UAK" has expired.
Also, the HMC has a lengthy message about the UAK expiration under a CoD
banner. It mentions that since the key has expired "Entitled system
firmware released after the key expires cannot be applied to the
server" I wrongly assumed that firmware was a SWMA thing, not a HWMA
thing and IBM responded that I needed a HWMA contract in order to get a
new key. I am not sure what that will cost, since I have never had HWMA
contract on any of my developer systems.

What is the overall impact of the expired UAK? I have had developer
systems for decades and never needed HWMA to keep it running so I don't
know if this is a new feature or something related to using an HMC vs a
console. Right now, all is well. But I don't know if there is a
downstream issue I will encounter if I don't purchase HWMA to update the
UAK.

Can anyone shed some light on the purpose/impact of the UAK and it's
expiration?

--
Pete Helgren
www.petesworkshop.com
GIAC Secure Software Programmer-Java
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
Twitter - Sys_i_Geek IBM_i_Geek

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