PVMe supports PVM, but its internal structure is completely new. As it runs on a PVMe homogeneous platform (The IBM 9076 SP2), many operations are simpler.

The following are the outstanding differences between the structure of the PVM and IBM AIX PVMe.

• PVMe does not interact directly with TCP/IP to implement data communication between processors. For this,it uses the System Communication (CSS), communications software that runs on the HPS adapter. Data exchange always occurs between processes, without involving the devil.
• The PVMe daemon runs in a single node and not all participating nodes as PVM.
• An improved scheme for memory management of PVMe can also take advantage of memory resources efficiently.

A vulnerability in IBM AIX 5.x and 6.x has been found which could be exploited by a local attacker to access sensitive information.The vulnerability is caused by a bug in the ‘at’ (/usr/bin/at) as it does not limit the privilege to read certain files (It has root permissions). This could be exploited by a local attacker to read any file.

This vulnerability confirmed in AIX 5.2.x, 5.3.xy 6.1.x. Depending on the version and platform, it is recommended to apply the following patches available for download from:

http://aix.software.ibm.com/aix/efixes/security/at_fix.tar
ftp://aix.software.ibm.com/aix/efixes/security/at_fix.tar

More Information:

AIX at information disclosure vulnerability

Cheat sheets are a great way of learning as well can be a great reference for experienced users. Below are some of popular IBM AIX Cheat Sheets which we believe can be useful.

AIX QuickSheet

AIX Commands Cheat Sheet

AIX Jumpstart for UNIX Professionals

AIX Cheat Sheet

Please share with us your favorite AIX Cheat sheet and let share the knowledge.

Cheat sheets is a great way of learning for new concepts, but they are invaluable when trying to learn command line for Linux. Below is a great collection of Linux Command Line Cheat sheets:

1. UNIX/LINUX REFERENCE CARD
2. The Humble Linux Cheat Sheet
3. DOS to Linux Cheat Sheet
4. Evelyn’s Linux Cheat Sheet
5. Luke’s Cheat Sheet for Linux
6. The One Page Linux Manual
7. Linux Security Quick Reference Guide
8. LINUX System Call Quick Reference
9. LINUX Admin Quick Reference
10. Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands
11. Linux Cheat Sheet
12. Linux Command-Line Cheat Sheet
13. Linux Quick Reference Guide
14. Linux Command Line Reference For Common Operation
15. TCP Ports List
16. Linux Cheat Sheet

The Open Source community should be highly proud of Ubuntu. It seems to be the distro which most worry Microsoft in the Desktop market which is Microsoft Lead market. Actually Microsoft has posted for “Director Open Source Desktop Strategy at Microsoft” at linkedin. I was suprised that Microsoft are looking to hire some one at that high level just to put a plan to compete with Ubuntu on the Desktop market. Seems the Ubuntu buzz is floating the market. With Ubuntu 9.04 approaching, Ubuntu has proven it self as a great Open Source alternative for Windows in the Desktop arena.

Let us know what do you think of Ubuntu in the comments area.

After the delay for releasing the new distribution of Debian, the mother of many distros, such as Ubuntu, Knoppix, or Lenny (Debian 5.0), it has finally seen the light. Few days ago they replicated the distro to all the mirrors so that you can now celebrate the 15th anniversary of the distribution. Download is available by both HTTP & Torrent.

After 22 months of development Debian 5.0 has been presented. The free operating system supports twelve arquitcturas constant. Debian GNU / Linux is a free operating system that supports a total of twelve architectures, Sun SPARC (sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola / IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel IA-32 (i386), IA-64 (ia64) HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), ARM (arm, Armel), IBM S/390 (s390), and AMD’s AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64). Apart from the most popular desktop environments: KDE, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE.

Ah it seems virtualization is what going to unite the largest competing vendors. Yes, I am talking about Microsoft, Redhat, and Novell. Not too long back Novell who purchased SUSE has got in an agreement with Microsoft in regards of Virtualization. So with SUSE making the lead seems REDHAT is going the same route as well. I guess there is things where the big players in the IT market have to get a long, and virtualization seems to be  one of the biggest at the moment.

Redhat has surprisingly announced the joint of Microsoft in the virtualization market, and they will provide a validation and certification programs for virtualization solutions. As Redhat announced a good validation & Certification program will allow the customers to deploy a heterogeneous solutions from Microsoft & Red Hat. It seems in few years virtualizations will unlock the boundaries between many competing vendors.

The next version of Ubuntu, whose development has reached the alpha stage 4, is surprisingly fast compared to its predecessor and Ubuntu 8.10 even without implementing the filesystem EXT4.

You can notice the speed difference from the moment you boot up the system. On our test machine Ubuntu 9.04 were able to boot up in just less than 20 seconds where Ubuntu 8.10 required just a bit more than 27 seconds on the same exact system. Ubuntu 9.04 seems to further highly enhance the I/O operations by as much as 20% from Ubuntu 8.10. Further more compilation from source code was more efficient on Ubuntu 9.04 than Ubuntu 8.10 by almost 19%. Our egg drop compilation took around 5 minutes less than it took on Ubuntu 8.10 with the same hardware.

Do you ever feel you wish you could answer some of your own questions when you work with AIX® and your System p™ server? Do you ever feel you could save time by not having to call on the support professionals all the time? Well, wish no more. Shiv Dutta discusses some of the AIX commands that answer those questions and tells you how to enlarge the list of such answers. Look at the below link for the Answer.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-dutta_cmds.html

Ah why not leave us a comment of what do you think?

Most companies these days restrict their internet access by forcing the usage of web proxy. If your company is forcing a proxy policy & you are running Redhat/CentOs/Fedora you will have to update your yum.conf to be able to update your desktop or server using yum over a proxy connection. Luckily setting up yum to run over a proxy is an easy task. below is the few steps you need to follow to establish just that.

Edit the file /etc/yum.conf and add the following lines:

  # The proxy server - server: port
  proxy=http://proxy.mydomain.com:3128
  # If proxy authentication is required
  proxy_username=yum_user
  proxy_password=yun_user_password 

The next step is to declare the variable http_proxy to run
when the yum rpm get executed to avoid the below error:

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: nokey, key
ID e8562897