aix

As you know, AIX has a vast array of commands that enable you to do a multitude of tasks.

At this point, I would perform some general AIX system health checks to ensure that the system is configured and running as I'd expect.

Every time you run a command in AIX, the system sets a variable that is often referred to as dollar question.

If there was an issue with the migration, I could easily back out to the previous release of AIX.

AIX newbies are sometimes surprised to hear that the VMM services all memory requests from the system, not just virtual memory.

All installation and configuration are accomplished using AIX and TSM's command prompt (just a few commands).

These tunable parameters are used to indicate how much memory the AIX kernel should use to cache non-computational pages.

The lpp_source and SPOT NIM resources that have been selected for the migration MUST match the AIX level to which you are migrating.

Don't forget to set a root password and any other security measures that you normally take when setting up a new AIX system.

AIX uses a memory-segmented architecture that limits the total number of segments used for shared memory and heap.

It has several easy interfaces that allow you to apply a security level to your AIX system with a single command.

All that remains is to copy the above script to each of the remaining AIX systems, and to run it.

The young men from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves, as though eager to speak patois for the last time.

AIX currently provides some PAM service modules, these provides at least one of module type described as above.

For best performance, use a volume group on the NIM master that does not contain the NIM resources being used for the AIX migration.

Using this tool, as you will soon see, allows you to perform your AIX migrations without the need for lengthy outages.

Only you can make this call, as you know more about how your AIX and POWER infrastructure is configured (and why) than anyone else!

Staying current with the latest AIX Technology Level (TL) is always the best option to better availability, reliability and security.

This configuration is an AIX file-system-level setting that adjusts the amount of memory used for file-system buffer.

When the command is ready to be executed, AIX will fork the process as sh -c exec .

AIX security commands and applications can be configured to call PAM modules through the use of existing loadable authentication framework.

As you know, there are two types of kernels in AIX.

First, AIX allows you to install software in one of two states: applied or committed.

The next type of boot on an AIX system is called the stand-alone boot, or maintenance mode option.

In these cases, dual booting the Linux and AIX operating systems can be an efficient way to provide each platform as you require.

And, in the process, I've found what I would consider to be the best, quickest, and easiest ways to manage AIX networking.

AIX uses a memory segmented architecture that limits the number of segments used for shared memory and heap.

Starting in 2006, as part of the IBM new AIX 5L Service Strategy, a Maintenance Level (ML) is referred to as a Technology Level (TL).

AIX does not support creating LDAP users and groups from AIX to an AD server, whether the AD server has the AIX LDAP schema or not.

The simplicity with which AIX allows you to configure networking is very clear.

During the installation process, one of the kernels, appropriate for the AIX version and the hardware in operation, is enabled by default.

From this point, you can run most AIX commands, define other users, and do most anything you would do with a full AIX system.

You are now ready to install the AIX operating system into your logical partition.

All the disks that are visible on the AIX client partition have to be virtual disks (exported from VIOS using virtual SCSI).

This is often a hard task, due to AIX optimization of memory.

With the storage carved up, we were able to assign the new LUNs to the existing AIX hosts and perform the migration.

Support for storage key: allows you to reduce the number of outages associated with memory overlays inside the AIX kernel.

This new feature, available only in AIX 6. 1, allows you to have fewer operating system images (kernels) on your POWER servers.

This feature can be used to monitor, track, record, and audit the activities of all users on an AIX system, including system administrators.

AIX audit does not know about su's done prior to the SSH connection.

I noticed several disks were identified as having AIX installed on them, but they did not belong to my VIOS rootvg!

By default, all core files that are generated on an AIX system will have the name core.

The system WPAR is closer to a complete version of AIX and is analogous to either sparse or fill root zones.

While the scope of this series was on tools available on AIX, don't be shy about researching other tools that might also be of value to you.

As it has been determined that the DS storage will be used for AIX systems requiring a high level of performance and availability.

It helps administrators restrict the Kerberos ticket lifetime issued to any user from that particular client AIX machine.

Just like the ancient Romans, who founded the city, visitors to Aix -en- Provence are delighted by its natural hot springs.

If you've been following the other series on AIX (see Resources), you know I love nmon and you should also, once you start using it.

JFS is required for SMS on AIX, and no concurrent access is possible in this case.

If the LDAP client and NIS client are configured on the same machine, then users are not able to create users from the AIX LDAP client.

The multiple base DN support feature of the AIX 5L operating system could be used to configure against such an Active Directory server.

As an AIX administrator, you should already be very familiar with many command-line tools, which will be helpful when making the transition.

You can find pre-complied binaries of each of these applications for AIX on dozens of online sites.

For this process to work, on the AIX server side I had to make a couple of changes to my Sendmail configuration.

From this point, the installation follows a standard AIX server installation.

Use this to direct and focus your organization (and AIX administrators) to be compliant with modern data center management methodologies.

If you choose to enable the AIX job spooler, be aware that any user on the system will be able to submit processes to the job spooler.

When the number of free page frames gets to a low value, the AIX kernel must empty out some locations in real memory for reuse of new pages.

Moreover, AIX supports the storage of common user information, along with its relative Kerberos and LDAP attributes in the LDAP directory.

AIX V7. 1 extends firmware-assisted dump capabilities to make it the default system dump method if it is supported by the platform.

One of the main challenges AIX adminstrators face is maintenance and upgrades of different software running on their systems.

AIX has basic attributes mappings for the AD server that do not cover the AIX extended attributes.

Fraisset says about 500 thousand visitors come to Aix each year to see where he created the majority of his works.

Thus, provisions for granular control and enhanced manageability of Kerberos credentials over AIX is another reason for riding up the grade.

The scope of this article is to extend some non-IBM LDAP servers with AIX LDAP schema and to configure AIX to work with such servers.

Unicode encodings and algorithms are used for internal and external communications in the AIX system.

IBM NAS for AIX provides serviceability in the form of debug messages, which are controlled using environment variables.

Now that AMS is available to AIX and POWER6 customers, I thought it would be worth sharing my experience with the AIX community.

The only thing they need to worry about is the actual customization of the look and feel for the user interface.

As discussed in the Javacore versus AIX core section, Javacore files are not always the best tool for debugging a hang situation.

A configured WPAR is a part of an LPAR and reduces the amount of AIX images that need to be maintained.

Just like with other forms of UNIX, AIX employs virtual memory structures to help complement physical memory.

Again, similar to the normal boot option, the AIX system is booted into a multi-user mode.

AIX provides several tools for providing information about counts of the different pages on the system.

Most of the systems run some distribution of Linux, but we also have several BSD, AIX and Sun systems as well.

Administrators with a hybrid environment can benefit from a single IBM NAS KDC on AIX for authentication across different platforms.

Turns off the automatic logging of the list of condition variables for use by the AIX debugger.

A JFS2 file system created to support internal snapshots cannot be modified on an earlier release of AIX.

It also drills down into the tuning parameters for the paging and organization of your virtual and physical memory within AIX Version 7.

In an easy way, it also allows you to backup an existing environment and restore it inside an AIX 7 WPAR.

This VIO server runs a special version of the AIX operating system, with an additional software package called IOS.

Simply put, if the appropriate device fileset is installed on the server, AIX can automatically detect and establish settings for it.

The partition-specific firmware provides a set of services specific to AIX and System p called Run-Time Abstraction Services (RTAS).

If a future AIX release updates the SMIT Object Repository, your changes might be lost and the files need to be re-installed.

The AIX Security Expert really provides a simple, quick, and comprehensive way of applying security standards.

AIX has benefited from the many hardware innovations that the POWER platform has introduced through the continues to do so.

AIX provides foreign identity mapping using EIM, which is an LDAP-based technology to manage multiple user registries in an organization.

The methodology details the entire life cycle of an IBM AIX system, from planning and deployment, through decommission and reclamation.

The SAN disks that are exported to the AIX client partition must be available to both the VIOS partitions on both the CECs.

On the child domain "SEC. IBM. COM" , create a user using the Active Directory users and computer snap in for the AIX machine.

At an agreed time, I reboot the LPAR and confirm that the system is now running AIX 6. 1.

In AIX, the inetd daemon provides Internet service management for a network and starts by default every time you start your system.

The AIX 5L LDAP client can be configured to use any of these attributes.

Once both my VIOS were activated and I'd verified the virtual adapter mappings and health checks, I started an AIX LPAR.

Hence, it is essential to understand the logging associated with IBM NAS server available on AIX.

For the manual installation, download the agent installation package directly to your AIX endpoint and uncompress.

Administering users and groups in IBM AIX is an essential part of an administrator's duties.

In recent years, through a myriad of innovations on the midrange, IBM has now brought green computing to Power Systems and AIX.

This article discussed how the concepts around cloud computing naturally lend themselves to AIX and Power Systems.

Matthew Cronk, AIX Kernel Developer, is the owner of the design specification for the IBM AIX operating system identification.

Before using spray, make sure that sprayd is not commented out of inetd (defaulted in AIX), and don't forget to refresh inetd.

The AIX Event Infrastructure is an event monitoring framework for monitoring predefined and user defined system events.

In this article, we are going to use an AIX system, motu. in. ibm. com, configured as a NFS client to the IBM SONAS system.

It's important to understand that whenever you change a UID or GID, you affect the permission levels of files in AIX.

AIX systems administrators can generally tell serious administrators from the inexperienced by the amount of times they rely on SMIT.

AIX 7 provides domain support in RBAC for greater security through a more granular administrator authority.

Only the root user can perform the configuration of Fast Connect for the AIX server; however, any user can access the configuration menu.

With AIX uDAPL, you can incorporate the features provided by the API, including the capability to do remote direct memory access (RDMA).

HACMP Planning Guide: This guide provides information necessary to plan and install the HACMP for AIX software.

A system WPAR is a process inside standard AIX machines (which I will call "Global" ) with its own execution environment.

Listing 4 represents data that contains the total number of user groups taken from an AIX applications box.

Perhaps your NIM server is also a good candidate, as it may be used infrequently, only to install AIX systems and perform maintenance?

As in the case of passwords, the AIX 5L administrator can configure the LDAP client to use a different group member attribute.

There may be times when you find it necessary to develop in both the Linux and AIX operating environments.

Perform an lspv command on each of the AIX nodes, and ensure that the nodes have access to all available storage.

And as a more generalized statement, the job of an AIX System administrator is to automate all tasks, including documentation.

Understanding the network subsystem, as it relates to AIX, is not an easy undertaking.

Unlike HP-UX or AIX, with Solaris you are going to use text files to do most of your work.

Column one contains the actual AIX group names and column two contains the total members.

IBM has announced a statement of direction to run AIX in a partition in a future iSeries release.

With an SVC in your environment, storage migrations (for the AIX administrator) become a thing of the past.

The LDAP implementation of the security subsystem in AIX is available as the LDAP authentication load module.

This is not a breakage of the AIX binary compatibility statement, but a fact that 32-bit kernel extensions are not supported.

This scenario involves creating a copy of the AIX operating system environment to be used at a later time for recovery.

On earlier versions of AIX, you only get P6 compatibility mode performance, wich is up to 30% performance penalty.

What be worth to be carried especially is the mark sex incident that reveals AIX powerful actual strength.

This file, initialized and maintained by the net user command, is a database of AIX Fast Connect users (and their encrypted passwords).

Filters could be used to define the set of accounts that will be visible to the AIX 5L operating system.

Users from different Kerberos realms in a particular AD forest can log in to a single AIX Kerberos client.

As a consequence of the new pbuf pool implementation, AIX displays and manages additional LVM statistics and tuning parameters.

This section provides an overview of general network monitoring commands and specific AIX tools available to you.

And even if the fileset is not installed, AIX will tell you what is needed to make it work.

AIX Profile Manager provides "dashboard" views and runtime configuration profile management over groups of networked systems.

Virtually all Solaris administrators who have made the transition to AIX have come to really enjoy this tool.

By default when you create a user or group in AIX, it simply assigns it the next available UID or GID number.

Make sure that the AIX client is configured with a FQDN (fully qualified domain name).

This section goes through the initial steps required to install and configure Kerberos and OpenSSH on AIX server and client machines.

Only a Javacore file might be sufficient, and it might involve collecting AIX core files and other information.

A month of this regimen and I should have been obliged to go to Baden Baden or Vichy or Aix les Bains.

With AIX, filesystems management is always based on top of the logical volumes.

The same holds true for AIX administrators when they need to understand virtualization and HP-UX.

However, many customers run two VIOS partitions to provide redundancy and fail-over to the AIX client partition.

HACMP can be used for this type of solution on AIX.

A single AIX system might contain multiple resource groups, and there typically is one volume group defined per resource group.

Kernel extension developers will not be able to build, or even test, 32-bit kernel extensions on AIX Version 6.

AIX Profile Manager will provide dashboard views and runtime configuration profile management over groups of networked systems.

If more than one AIX migration is occurring for multiple NIM clients, make sure there is capacity for a copy of each clients rootvg.

AIX operating system binaries can be stored in file systems local to the hosting logical partition.

AIX toolkit: OpenSSH is now part of the standard AIX toolkit.

If possible, wait until the migration has finished and the system has been rebooted on the new version of AIX.

On Windows and AIX, write cache is available through the use of SSA disks with a fast write nonvolatile cache.

alt_disk_copy can also be used for testing two different versions of AIX.

The IBM Systems Director Console for AIX is a Web-based management console that provides centralized access to system administrators.

The supported devices differ between AIX and POWERVM VIOS, as well.

In AIX, the second field can contain one of two characters, either ! or *.

These functions internally map with AIX security functions to handle user management tasks under different directories.

The Virtual Memory Manager (VMM) of AIX anticipates page requirements for observing the patterns of files that are accessed.

This helps various AIX users across all industries to tier their data to use efficiently the available infrastructure for maximum yield.

And that's how you can significantly reduce paging on your AIX system using vmo.

In AIX, the cfgmgr command detects any hardware devices present on the system and even tells you which device drivers may be missing.

Assuming that you are not using NIM, you then see the AIX installation window after a few more moments of testing.

With your chosen parts in place, launch vncserver on the AIX host with vncserver : 2 or similar, and a password you keep safe.

This is actually less than in previous AIX versions but still a significant impact on your overall system performance.

Users require root-level authorization and a working knowledge of AIX system administration.

AIX only uses the larger pages sized if it doesn't result in increasing process memory usage.

Three main areas of basic administration will help facilitate understanding all other areas of AIX systems administration.

This section lists a few performance monitoring tips for AIX and Domino servers.

The SLES system is configured as a NFS client to the AIX system from where the end users access their files.

Any discussion of memory and AIX must start with a description of the VMM.

Both filesystem types link their file and directory data to the structure used by the AIX LVM for storage and retrieval.

Most of the required open source packages can be found in the IBM AIX Toolbox download page.

As an AIX administrator, you should already know some of the basics of performance tuning.

This section offers an overview of the Network File System as it relates to AIX.

The tracing tools that are provided within AIX are used to record detailed information about the packets.

At the AIX shell prompt, it takes three commands to compile the programs, one command to generate an executable main program and run it.

AIX 7 uses all available memory, except memory that is configured to be unallocated and known as the free list.

The AIX hosts were all using dedicated FC adapters (HBAs).

The file systems shown in Listing 1 above all come as part of a standard installation of AIX 7. 1.

TL is a set of fixes, and new features added to an AIX version or new hardware support.

To users and applications, a system WPAR appears almost exactly like a full AIX system.

In contrast, AIX is broken down into four main operating system levels: version, release, technology level (TL), and service pack (SP).

This article is intended for experienced Lotus Domino system administrators familiar with the AIX platform.

AIX, through tight integration of the kernel and VMM, makes use of a methodology called demand paging.

AIX V7. 1 provides a facility for a user with sufficient privileges to modify the number of hardware keys available for user keys.

There are a number of tunable parameters that you can use to control how AIX selects pages to replace.

First, you install and configure the management server software on an AIX system in your environment.

Linking objects to create executables and shared libraries and objects is perhaps the most difficult aspect of porting applications to AIX.

Please keep in mind, though, that if you use this option in AIX 5L, the file system will not be accessible from previous versions of AIX.

Installing a WPAR Manager sub-agent that extends the base Director agent software on the managed AIX systems to support WPAR operations.

AIX 7 will allow you to scale up to 1, 024 threads or 256 cores in a single partition.

This allowed us time to verify that the steps were correct and that the AIX migrations would complete as expected.

To test this feature, transfer a large file from AIX to the Windows client through a mapped drive.

The complete list of all the probes and their usage can be found in the respective manuals.

What you find is that as a practical matter, AIX LVM is really more like VERITAS, but without the premium price and third party issues.

In AIX, auditing systems are intended to record security-related information and to alert administrators about security breaches.

I discuss how AIX uses virtual memory to address more memory than is physically on your system.

The pam_aix module supports authentication, account, password and sessions management module types.

The hardware was configured in a three-tier environment using various pSeries AIX servers.

Please consult the operating system documentation for the particular version of UNIX on non-AIX platforms.

If you log in to an RHEL4 server or an AIX server, at first there will appear to be little difference between the two.

Luke Browning, AIX Kernel Architect, has given much support on this article, and others.

If necessary, subdirectories are created in the AIX Event Infrastructure file system to create the necessary monitor file.

I strongly suggest that AIX administrators receive appropriate training to ease the transition process.

To resolve the page fault, the AIX kernel loads the referenced page to a location in real memory.

This article showcases the ability of AIX IPSec to work across heterogeneous environments.

In this case, AIX scans both classes of pages and evicts the least recently used pages.

It was version 4 of AIX, and I used X Windows some, but most work was done in the terminal.

In AIX 5. 3, the size of a JFS2 file system can be shrunk as well.

From this point, it is a normal AIX installation.

Performance Toolbox for AIX (PTX) : A comprehensive tool for monitoring and tuning system performance.

Whenever you change your memory allocation for an AIX system, you need to review paging space requirements.

In multitasking OSs, including AIX, more than one program uses system resources, including memory.

AIX treats large pages as pinned memory and does not provide paging support for large pages.

While AIX 5L Version 5. 2 did not allow creation of classical concurrent mode VGs, it did support them.

Start the UI on a system running Microsoft Windows and use a remote debug engine running on AIX to connect to the UI.

AIXPCM supports all devices that the AIX operating system and VIOS POWERVM firmware support, including selected third-party devices.

LVM is an AIX disk management system that maps the data between logical and physical storage.

The cause of the issue is the lack of AIX LDAP schema support in these servers.

The IBM AIX job spooler is a very useful built-in utility on all AIX systems but is rarely enabled or utilized.

The required dependent libraries and http server can also be downloaded from here or from the AIX toolbox website.

Use ifconfig (see Listing 8) to make sure that the interface reported is configured to AIX and showing as UP and RUNNING.

This feature allows the user to create a new instance of the AIX Base Operating System (BOS) within the running rootvg.

AIX Profile manager will also provide copy machine-like simplicity for distributing OS properties to many systems.

The new system must be capable of running the AIX as installed in the rootvg.

Cezanne's last studio in Aix is a place haunted by the memory of this art master.

You can even use the AIX LVM to migrate to a completely new SAN storage subsystem (see Resources).

HP-UX was most similar to IBM, while Solaris mostly maintained their text-file centric approach to system administration.

This document describes the use of Kerberos as an alternative authentication mechanism to AIX .

Traditional methods of monitoring AIX memory will need to be reviewed, as there are new considerations with AMS and logical memory.

With Linux you also won't have the Object Data Manager (ODM), which AIX utilizes for managing devices and configuration files.

I also thank Glenn Miller for his outstanding support in all matters concerning AIX and HACMP setup.

The AIX performance monitoring commands use the PUR register to calculate processor utilization.

This section explains a retransmission time-out (RTO) implementation using a timer wheel algorithm on AIX.

Through the years, he has worked for both large and small organizations and has held diverse positions from CIO to Senior AIX Engineer.

The AIX 5L LDAP client supports up to 10 base DNs for each entity; any additional base DNs will be ignored.

If your AIX system is already configured as a LDAP client to the AD server, skip this step.

See the Resources section of this article for more information about AIX support for multiple page sizes.

But now, let's dive more into the concepts and nuances of the various pieces of AIX.

The maximum length of the installation path supported is 108 bytes on AIX and 105 bytes on HPPA.

Within the AIX Download and service Information, there is a table that contains all of the supporting Java products on AIX.

AIX has wonderful tools for actively detecting and diagnosing potential problems with servers.

Figure 1 indicates the example setup, which has an AIX system serving as a file server exporting with the NFS protocol.

To ensure timely response from the AIX support teams, it is important that you follow the instructions below.

Also, I'll assume that your AIX systems already have SAN connectivity to your existing SAN fabric.

First, AIX has actually undergone changes allowing it to recognize new hardware at boot time.

This article covered the details on how to set up the IBM NAS master KDC on AIX to use the LDAP directory.

This article shares two interesting tricks that I discovered with Sendmail on AIX.

You can update the alternate instance with a different level of AIX software updates while the primary instance is up and running.

These resources cover all major topics that administrators or developers working with Kerberos on AIX need to know: A must-bookmark page!

For this to happen, AIX suspends the entire process prior to moving it to paging space.