Archive for February, 2009

What is AIX?

A crazy question huh. I was wondering how many people who will fall on my blog by mistake or even who meant to will know what AIX stand for. So I thought I will give a hint to all of you.

According to wikipedia AIX (A dvanced I nteractive eXecutive) is a proprietary UNIX operating system from IBM. Originally meant “Advanced IBM Unix” but the name probably was not approved by the legal department and was changed to “Advanced Interactive Executive

Its official development owner website is http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/aix/ further more the biggest addon to AIX from other Unix flavors is the SMIT administration tool, which is a text mode interface that easy administration tasks in AIX.

AIX: Storage Migration

A typical AIX system administrator problem is the importance of these systems, and being not able to stop them at anytime & for any reason. A downtime on these AIX boxes are very expensive and the admin has to avoid at all cost. In the other hand, its often the case where the admin has to move the data from one disk to another without losing data. Furthermore, the admin has to avoid downtime while handling the migration. Few typical reasons why the admin need to migrate data between different disks or even storages are:

  • The requirment to move to a larger disk
  • The requirement to move to a different Raid Configuration disk

IBM Software FTP

If you are looking for some IBM AIX / Pseries software, or even if you are looking for any IBM software in general then you must check out ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/

The above ftp server is loaded with legal IBM software than you can use or just learn about them. Check it out & comment which of these tools were usefull for you.

AIX: Changing a volume group

Throughout the life of a volume group (VG) can happen a lot. The most common are in relation to its size or its physical volumes. Ah, I can hear a lot of you thinking about how to expand their volume :).

When changing the size of a physical volume (PV) AIX does not realize it hot. In AIX boxes it is common that the disk is coming from an external storage (Ex: SAN) and some of the LUNs which correspond to devices that exist in hdiskX VG has been expanded. We recalculate the size of available disk with the following:

# Chvg -g

For more info about Chvg check out:  IBM Pseries Chvg.

IBM POWER Servers & IBM AIX Error Codes

When you get to the most unfortunate time & you have a failure with your AIX box it get to be handy to have the list of AIX Error Codes and their diagnosis. Although googling & internet searching is invaluable options these days, when searching for a resolution for AIX ensure it is totally related to IBM AIX.  For that the AIX error codes list provided by IBM becomes invaluable in these cases. Below is these codes for AIX running on IBM POWER 5 & IBM POWER 6:

Progress or error codes in AIX (POWER5)
Reference codes for POWER6

Why * BSD is dying? SuperFunny :)

This is a super funny video explaining why BSD is dying. You really should watch this for a good laugh :). Though Please don’t get us wrong we love BSD, but can’t persist this funny video.

FreeBSD 7.1 RELEASE is now Available

FreeBSD 7.1 has been officially announced few weeks back, this version of FreeBSD has incorporated some changes and some improvements over its predecessor RELEASE FreeBSD 7.0 including:

  • The ULE scheduler is now the default in the kernel of the i386 and amd64 architectures.
  • DTrace is completely ported to FreeBSD from OpenSolaris.
  • BootLoader is amended to allow boot from USB devices.
  • Upgrade to KDE 3.5.10 and upgrade to GNOME 2.22.3.
  • Now we can download all the discs in one DVD just for the i386 and amd64 architectures (quite good news for those who bothered much of jogging cds all the time).

for those interested in learning more about new features, bugs fixes, changes in FreeBSD 7.1, please check the official FreeBSD announcement.

ext4fs Fedora 11 (and RHEL 6?)

I have noticed that Fedora 11 (Leonidas) used ext4fs as file system by default.

Ext4fs main features are:

  • Compatibility with ext3FS
  • Larger file system support (> 16T)
  • larger File Size Support (> 2T)
  • Scalability of subdirectories
  • Extents
  • Multi Allocation
  • Delayed allocation
  • fsck faster
  • Checksum Journal
  • Journal mode
  • Online defragmentation
  • Persistent pre-allocation
  • Barriers

Being Fedora 11 is the base for the development of the new version of RHEL, we can expect a great upcoming Linux distribution.

So I recommend Red Hat rather than Windows for your Enterprise :). Please leave a comment with your Linux Success stories :).

Fedora 11 codename is Leonidas

With a total of 1108 votes of 2480 possible, the code name of Fedora 11 is as follows:

Leonidas

The other candidates names were untamed, Claypool, Brasília, Blarney, Duchess, Zampone, Euryalus.

The original note https: / / www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-January/msg00010.html.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is out

Red Hat, Inc., the leading global provider of open source solutions, has announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 on the 20th of Jan 2009.

This third update of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provides a wide range of improvements, including virtualization, significantly increased scalability, expanded hardware platform and supported the inclusion of OpenJDK Java technologies.

The new version is available for immediate download from Red Hat Network.

The original Red Hat Press.

Ah again I need to upgrade my servers :). Don’t You!!