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

To declare the variable http_proxy run:

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.