We have a Microfocus Subscription Management tool installed at our site running sles12sp5 and version 1.1 of the smt. Ineeded to upgrade this server to sles15sp5, and also at the same time, upgrade smt to version 2.0. I took a snapshot of the vm before hand, then upgraded using the instructions at:-

https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/subscription-management-tool/smt-2.0/mfsmt/t4asa15btbmv.html

After the upgrade, I looked at the smt-schema-upgrade.service and noticed that it had failed. I searched for a resolution to the problem and found a promising article:-

https://portal.microfocus.com/s/article/KM000016457?language=en_US

We were running at schema version 2.11 before the upgrade. I could not for the life of me locate the sql file (smt-migration-schema-2.12-fix.sql) mentioned in the fix. Did a search on the filesystem, did a google search, still turned up nothing. I noticed that the sql error was the following:-

ERROR 1366 (22007) at line 2: Incorrect string value: '\xC2\x80\xC2\x9Cin...' for column `smt`.`Patches`.`DESCRIPTION` at row 96

This led me to search for any help on this issue. It seems that it is a character set issue, upon checking the character_set_name for the tables, I noticed that all the tables are set to latin1. I usually choose utf8 for my character sets in all the databases I have created before (mysql,postgresql,mssql), but obviously didn't have this option with microfocus smt server. I thought I would try to change the character set for the table in question, and rerun the schema upgrade. This time, it did complete, but left me wondering whether I should change the other tables as well, or if I did, would that have a negative impact on the smt system.

For now, I have reverted to the snapshot I took, and will look to upgrading again, either once I have sourced the official fix, or just take the plunge and redo my previous fix and maybe change the character set for all the other tables.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Jon