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

Well, one of the things I was doing this week was moving mail servers around. While I was doing that I was going through some old mail and found this, might be of some help to some one.

For those who are interested in knowing how to access a volume group that has quorum checking turned on but not enough disks… This is what I did on a IBM B80, that lost a disk that was in a volume group that held paging space and was not mirrored for what ever reason, and as a result it crashed the machine.

#Force the varyon of the volume group in to systems maintenance mode

#remove the disk from the volume group that had died, you need the PVID

#Show what disks are in the vg, should only be one now

#Varyoff and on to make sure it works right

#add the replaced disk in to the vg

#show that it was added

After this was done, I then added the paging space back to hdisk 2 and then mirrored the volume group. The reason the machine crashed was from a couple of different things.

1. The volume group was not mirrored, and when hdisk2 died, it took a paging space with it.

2. quorum checking was left on. If there are only 2 disks in a volume group, make sure that quorum checking is off, otherwise you will never be able to access the volume group with out doing the above steps.

Technorati Tags: AIX

AIX AIX

Had a problem today with an AIX machine trying to send mail to the Internet. It seems that by default AIX ignores the DS line in the sendmail.cf if it thinks the receiving host is on a local network. So to fix it you need to find the line that contains the followig: (it is about 60% down in the file) ::

And comment it out. It “should” have a comment like such above it:

Once you comment it out, all the mail will now be sent directly to the host defined in the DS entry. You may have to stop and restart sendmail for it to take effect.

Technorati Tags: AIX, Sendmail

AIX, Sendmail AIX, Sendmail

I have spent over a week trying to get this to work. After going through 3 different level 2 LDAP techs with IBM, it is working, (knocking extremly freaking hard on wood). Here are my suggestions for IBM:

1. Drop the use of DB2
2. Drop the requirement of needing 2 seperate userid’s just to get it installed.
3. Get the documentation on your web site updated, and take down the white papers that are referencing information that is 2 years old.
4. Call Sun and learn how to do it right.

AIX, LDAP AIX, LDAP

If you are going to try to do LDAP user authenication on AIX 5.2 or 5.3, make sure you have the latest bos.rte.security installed (at the time 5.2.0.51 for 5.2 aix). If you don’t you will get some extrememly weird things happening.

AIX, LDAP AIX, LDAP