Guru: How To Acquire The IBM i Administration Runtime Expert Product And PTFs
May 17, 2021 Dawn May
In past articles about the Administration Runtime Expert, I mentioned that you install the ARE licensed program product on your central system, but I never documented steps on how you acquire the 5733-ARE program product. I apologize for this oversight since, as it turns out, obtaining ARE is not immediately obvious.
To get the 5733-ARE product, you must log into the IBM Support website and go to your Entitled Systems Support page. Under My Entitled Software, select Software Downloads. You need to select your system that is entitled to IBM software, the category of IBM i, and then the appropriate release group. You will get a list of entitled products to select from; chose 5771-SS1. The following screen capture is an example of this step:
Click the Continue button.
In the next step, select the language group, then click the Continue button again.
Now you will be asked to select the download package. This is the tricky step as it may not be obvious which package you should select. You want the package with B_GROUP1 in the name.
Take the packages link to the left to expand the contents. Within the list you will see Selected Program Products for i V7.x, where x is your release. You only need to select that package for download, not the entire B_GROUP.
Once the file is downloaded, expand the zip file to access the image file that you can load into an image catalog. Use the RSTLICPGM to install the product.
If you have DVD media, you need to locate the Selected Program Products disk; it looks like the image below:
Finally, ensure that you are current on PTFs for ARE. The easiest way to do this is to get the latest HTTP Group PTF (5770-DG1 group), as the ARE PTFs are included in this group PTF. However, if you have a need to get the latest PTFs but can’t update the HTTP Group, you can find the PTFs on Fix Central. You will need the latest ARE core PTF, which is part of SS1, and the latest ARE product PTF. To find these PTFs, search “Administration Runtime Expert.”
Which gives results as shown in the screen capture below:
It’s great that IBM made ARE available for no additional charge, but they didn’t make it easy to obtain.
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