AIX SUMA and PowerVS - "0500-059 Entitlement is required to download. The system's serial number is not entitled"

Working with PowerVS recently we encountered an AIX SUMA problem, were SUMA suddenly stopped working and was presenting us with the "0500-059 Entitlement is required to download. The system's serial number is not entitled" message. Power servers in the PowerVS environment are automatically entitled, so we should be able to download AIX fixes from the IBM Fix Central without any issues.

In the end we did the following and SUMA started working again.

# echo "COUNTRY_CODE = AU" >> /var/suma/data/config.suma

# export SUMA_COUNTRY_CODE=AU

From AIX support:

"Lets check what country code SUMA is passing. Please follow the steps described in the IBM Technote "MUSTGATHER: Getting assistance for SUMA errors through AIX Support"

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/719985 and collect a debug output of the 'suma' command.

In the resulting file eccTrace0.0.log search for the line starting with "user.country: ...".

We suspect it will show "US":

# grep "user.country:" eccTrace0.0.log

user.country: US

...

If it does indeed show "user.country: US" then please run the following commands:

# echo "COUNTRY_CODE = AU" >> /var/suma/data/config.suma

# export SUMA_COUNTRY_CODE=AU"

We're located in Australia, so obviously you'd need to use your specific country code if you hit this issue, but it could be worth a try. Anyway, I hope this helps.