unixwiz

Thought this was intresting. If IBM wants people to use their PowerPC chips on the desktop then need to go a lot lower than $4,000 for a “desktop” workstation. I can get an entry level Sun Blade 150 machine for under $1,000. Granted it does not have the same specs as the IBM one does, but for some one starting out on a platform, I would much rather spend less money and get a slightly slower machine than a lot to find out that something does not work right. One thing that is not mentioned on that page, but on the IBM page is that it is really a “server”. Which means this little desktop machine weighs in a 55 pounds. Now to compare this machine versus a Sun Ultra 45, just on specs from each vendors web site lets see both maxed out:

All in all, you may end up paying a little more for a Ultra45, but then again, it is a way better machine than the pSeries 185. It also runs Solaris which I feel is far superior to AIX. AIX is cool and all, but has too many quirks that just does not make to much sense. There are things in Solaris that are done so much easier and faster than in AIX that just make me laugh when I have to answer how to do something in AIX vs Solaris.

Here are some of my pet quirks about AIX:

1. Disk numbering scheme: all disks in AIX are named in the form of hdisk#. To find out exactly where they are at you have to do either a “lsdev -Cc disk” or “lsattr -El hdisk#” to find the actual controller and slot it is connected to.
2. ODM: Seems too much like the windows registry to me. Screw it up, and your machine does not boot right
3. The “dumbing” of Sysadmins by their dependence on SMIT. Take a AIX admin and put them in front of Solaris/Linux/etc and have them try to do any administrative tasks, and it is a complete loss with out smit. But take a Solaris/Linux/etc admin and put them on AIX, and they can accomplish most of the same administrative tasks with out touching SMIT
4. NIM, Nim is AIX’s equivelant of Jumpstart on Solaris. Jumpstart can be setup in probably under 10 minutes and be booting and installing machines. Nim on the other hand is an all day affair. I kid you not, I spent 8+ hours one day configuring an NIM environment to boot 1 machine. And even then, it did not install all the needed software. It also takes forever to copy 8 CD’s of AIX install media, plus the “Linux ToolKit”, Plus the expansion pack just to get SSH installed on AIX when NIM is used to install a system. If I could only get AIX to boot from a jumpstart server I would be set.
5. Missing core software that should be installed no matter what type of install you do. For example SSH. What operating system besides Microsoft Windows now days does not come installed with SSH? AIX, yup, you have to have 3 different cd’s to install it, and you better be using the OpenSSH supplied by IBM, or they will refuse to talk to you about any problems. (Yes they actually had me verify every part of the version of SSH before they would talk to me.
6. Root allowed to log in remotely. By default when you install AIX, root can log in remotely. MMM Bad Mkay…..
7. Default Open Relay: Last time I checked Sendmail on AIX is still configured by default to be an open relay.
8. Syslog: AIX likes to put stuff in its proprietory errpt. Which means to get the information to log to a central syslog server, you have to modify the ODM to run a script to grab output from the errpt command to send to syslog. Why can’t it send to syslog by default?

And the list could go on for ever, but right now it is time to go to bed.

AIX, Computer Hardware, IBM, Random Stuff, Rant, Solaris, Sun AIX, Computer Hardware, IBM, Random Stuff, Rant, Solaris, Sun

Our Sun E25K showed up today. My thanks to sun for finally fixing the door design on the the StarCat series. Our F12K and E20K have the old style doors that are a pain to get shut and keep shut. These new doors look a lot better. Tuesday is when we are going to power it on. Going to be an intresting day as we will have 3 huge machines (Sun F12k, Sun E25K, and IBM pSeries p590) all running in our data center at the same time and it is getting close to a deafening in there. We were surprised at how loud the IBM pSeries 590 is when it powers on, you can almost be blown away if you are standing behind it.

IBM, Sun IBM, Sun

Well in the next month we will have a ton (both literal and weight wise) of new toys. For starters from Sun:

1. E25K almost fully loaded (Supposed to be in by the end of the month)
2. 7 x SunFire V490′s (Half of these are in)
3. 4 x SunFire V210′s (these have come in already)

On the IBM side we received a pSeries p590 the other day and some upgrades to our pSeries p690.

By next month we will have an E25K, E20K, F12K, p690 and a p590 all running, plus hundreds of smaller Sun and IBM machines. Talk about some horse power, and heat.. Bad part is the F12K will be going back to Sun once we move all the domains on it to the E25K, which should take about an hour of downtime per domain. I really like the big Sun boxes as they are extremely easy to move resources around when you need them. For example last month one of our iPlanet Mail servers was having problems. It normally runs on a 2 x 1.2GHZ UltraSparc III domain, well the load on the machine was up to over 150, and nothing we could do would bring it down. So I started moving processors and memory in to it, and it slowly started speeding up. All this was done on the fly and was extremely nice. Once we got it under control we moved the processors and memory back out of it to the original domain they were a part of and did not have any outages at all.

IBM, Sun IBM, Sun