Within a few days the latest Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 will be available. The official planned availability day is 15 November 2019. For details please have a look at these two links IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 7 and IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 1 or you might try to google for the latest Technology Refreshes, where all the available information is more tailored to your needs and presented to you in an easier to read article.

In this article I am not going into great detail about the new functionality with one exception. In one of my last articles I was trying to convince IBM to give us the option to roll back one step if we did press F9 one time too many on the CLI. The good news here is that F8 now has the function to do this, only if F8 does not already have another function on the display where you are. IBM added an extra option to F9, when you press F9 with “WRK*” on the command line, F9 will retrieve the last command you used with that “WRK” prefix. For details please have a look at the IBM i PTFs SI70959 (7.4) and SI71070 (7.3).

Staying current is something I hate to explain, because for me it is a no-brainer. When talking about a Technology Refresh it also means you get new functionality, it feels like still using a hand-drill instead of something modern. With that in mind I would like to tell how to get all the goodies from these new Technology Refreshes.

As a Technology Refresh consist of several parts, the first thing is to decide which of them you want. The updates for IBM i are presented to you in PTF’s, the updates for IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) are available as a complete new version of this product. The new Open source options are available through Open Source Package Management. The updates for RDI are available when using the IBM Installation Manager. Ordering all the goodies of the Technology Refresh being made available as PTFs has been made very simple by IBM. \

The command SNDPTFORD is all you have to do to order all the PTFs, SNDPTFORD PTFID(SF997x1) CHKPTF(*YES). Please replace the x by the release number you are on, so Either SF99731 or SF99741. When you have given your system access to the Internet, this command will only download what you are missing and will put the PTF’s where they need to be for applying.

Afterwards use Navigator for i to initiate an INSPTF command or run the command INSPTF LICPGM((*ALL)) INSTYP(*DLYALL) from CLI.  Another option is to change the PWRDWNSYS parameter, PWRDWNSYS DELAY(600) RESTART(*YES) INSPTFDEV(*SERVICE). For the update of ACS please use this link, which does require an IBM ID.

For the new Open Source packages ZeroMQ and Redis all you have to do is access “Open Source Package Management” which can be found in ACS under the Tools menu. After signing on this will open a window with the tab “Available Packages”, select them and press “Install”. In a new dialog window you must start the install by answering “Y” to the question “Is this OK?”.

When done you need to close the window yourself, so pay attention to the message when it is done. The final part of this Technology Refresh is for RDI, just start the IBM Installation Manager and select “update”. Before getting ready to update RDi, you might need to update the Installation Manager first. Select what you want to update and select the box to “Update all packages with recommended updates and recommended fixes”. After that it is all ‘next, next and finish’.
So now you know all about the “Latest and Greatest” and how to get it.

Have fun using it!!