Method error 0514-068 when running cfgmgr

After a long hiatus from posting, I decided I’d start randomly posting again. Recently, I was asked to migrate a very old AIX host for a customer. The first thing I noticed on this host when I logged in was the following errors appearing when I ran cfgmgr:

aixhost:/# cfgmgr
Method error (/usr/lib/methods/defops):
        0514-068 Cause not known.
sh: /usr/lib/methods/defops:  not found.

Method error (/usr/lib/methods/cfgfan):
        0514-068 Cause not known.
sh: /usr/lib/methods/cfgfan:  not found.

When you run cfgmgr on AIX, there are various rules and tasks run as part of the process, from the above it was obvious that at some point, tools were installed on the host that ran cfgfan and defops (likely for a previous migration of an AIX level) and never cleaned up. You can view the entries in the odm by running odmget Config_Rules, or view a specific rule by running odmget Config_Rules -q rule=/usr/lib/methods/cfgfan for example. In this particular case, to remove the two methods, it was as simple as running odmdelete -o Config_Rules -q rule=/specific/rule/to/delete, for example, the following the following

aixhost:/# odmdelete -o Config_Rules -q rule=/usr/lib/methods/cfgfan
0518-307 odmdelete: 1 objects deleted.
aixhost:/# odmdelete -o Config_Rules -q rule=/usr/lib/methods/defops
0518-307 odmdelete: 1 objects deleted.

After this, cfgmgr ran without errors.