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Pietro Paolo Martucci IT/PDP
The public interactive and batch services, RSPLUS and RSBATCH, are running AIX 4.1.5, the same version of the AIX operating system as was running on the SP2 services. This version of AIX is rather old (we installed AIX 4.1.5 on the SP2 services in early 1996) and we must upgrade AIX to support the LHC++ and Objectivity/DB software that is becoming more widely used.
Two more recent versions of AIX are available from IBM, AIX 4.2 and AIX 4.3, and we will be upgrading to one of these versions before the end of this year. At the very least, we have to switch to AIX 4.2 but we would like to migrate directly to AIX 4.3. The alternative, moving to AIX 4.2 now and then AIX 4.3 sometime next year, would clearly be more disruptive.
We cannot yet say which AIX version we will move to this year as we do not yet know if LHC++ software and Objectivity/DB will run under AIX 4.3. These software packages, and all the usual ASIS packages, are being tested now under AIX 4.3 and we hope to be able to make a decision soon.
In any case, users should be prepared for some disruption to the RSPLUS and RSBATCH services in November or December although we will, of course, try to make any upgrade as smooth as possible. We do not expect that either upgrade will create problems for user programs but we will make available test systems before the full upgrade.