3.4 Perform a Test Installation

3.5 Evaluate Disk Utilities and Customer-Written Tools

Over the years, you may have collected numerous tools to manage hard disk volumes and/or the OS/2 Workplace Shell. Some tools may be started out of self-written REXX procedures. Be aware of problems caused by new features of OS/2 Warp Server for e-business described in the following sections.

3.5.1 Workplace Shell Issues

OS/2 Warp Server for e-business's Workplace Shell, WPS, is based on the desktop of OS/2 Warp 4. The WPS has changed significantly, for example, Warp Center will be installed instead of the launchpad. Some folders have changed name and location, for example, the Network Applications Folder, which can now be found in the Connections folder. Consider that tools that reference to some of these items (for example, during an unattended installation) will need to be modified or rewritten.

3.5.2 File System Issues

As mentioned in the previous chapters, OS/2 Warp Server for e-business introduces two new file system features:

  1. The Journaled File System (JFS)

  2. The Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

It's very important to know that LVM substitutes the well-known FDISK, which cannot handle the volumes created by LVM during the migration to OS/2 Warp Server for e-business. In order to prevent FDISK from doing any harm to the logical volume structure, it is not part of the product anymore. For this reason, consider replacing all occurrences of FDISK.COM in your source code by LVM.EXE. 



[C:\]lvm /query

Disk                 Size (MB) Free Space:  Total Largest
[ D1 ]                    2016                  0       0
   Disk Partition       Size (MB) Type     Status       Logical Volume
   [ BOOT MANAGER ]             1 Primary  In use
   BootPartition              500 Primary  In use       BootVolume
   DataPartition             1476 Logical  In use       DataVolume
   DumpPartition               35 Logical  In use       DumpVolume

[C:\]
Figure 3: Output of the LVM /QUERY Command

Also, in many current CID environments, the output of FDISK /QUERY is used to collect information about number, size, and type of the machine's logical drives. As you can see in Figure 3 above, although the output of LVM /QUERY is very similar to FDISK's, it doesn't match perfectly. This may also imply minor modifications to the source code of your custom-written scripts.

Important Note

If you use third party products to manage your servers' partitions, such as Powerquest's Partition Magic, please verify that they support LVM and JFS.

Also, make sure that your backup software can handle JFS-formatted drives.

3.6 Obtain Hardware Configuration Disks