Examine how to best migrate your Linux skills to take advantage of AIX and Solaris. Linux is all the rage, but what if you have experience in Linux and need to apply it to a commercial UNIX environment? UNIX and Linux are similar, and many of the same principles exist; there is a shell, root is still all powerful, and many of the tools and applications are the same. This tutorial will show you how to cope and understand the nuances and differences.
The information provided was pretty basic and does not cover differences in device management, which I would think is pretty important for a *nix administrator to know.
The registration process to read the .pdf file should be mentioned, and is somewhat of a PITA considering the amount of materials available from IBM without registration.
after a bugmenot lookup i was able to log on and download the pdf
the document is pretty basic, but short and structured and with good links to more detailed further reading
the author makes it pretty clear that most commercial unixes are a bit limited compared to the gnu/linux tools; he suggests to install free software like bash on your commercial unix box when you want to migrate without too much hassle
I can’t speak for AIX and HP-UX, but Solaris has had bash as a shell option since Solaris 9, so there is no need to “get it”, it’s already there.
I can’t speak for AIX and HP-UX, but Solaris has had bash as a shell option since Solaris 9, so there is no need to “get it”, it’s already there.
Since much earlier, in fact. bash is installed by default in Solaris 8, and was available much, much longer.
“he suggests to install free software like bash on your commercial unix box when you want to migrate without too much hassle”
I’m pretty sure there are other, more fundamental, differences between commercial *nix’es and Linux that affects migration than the shell.
Of course, there’ probably more mentioned in the pdf but i dont feel like registrering on yet another site just to read some stuff.
Edited 2006-08-01 06:32
WHAT ABOUT IRIX, WHAT ABOUT IRIX?
Oh, wait.
…and wait…and wait…
And what about HP-UX? SCO OpenServer? Tru64 (Digital Unix)?
I’ve been using Linux for many years, but recently I have been using AIX at work. It’s taken me a long time to really get used to standard system administration tasks on AIX, and I’m still a bit clumsy at it.
The number one sticking point is the shell. I like scripting in ksh, but it sucks as an interactive shell compared to bash or zsh. Most people enable this vi mode for command line editing that’s really clunky. ESC- is tab complete (with no double-tab option listing), ESC-k moves up the history, and using the arrow keys in insert mode deletes text in whichever direction. You enable this mode by doing ‘set -o vi’ which is just one example of the 47,000 uses of the set command.
Forget about software installation, I just let other people take care of that for me. I don’t know where to find binary filesets for AIX, and I’m not too excited about building from source using the included gcc-2.95. Everybody I work with seems to have handfuls of package directories for various update tasks on their NFS shares, each directory with this sort of dependency file that you need to generate yourself. Even on new installations, everything is really old, like a version of perl that was released in 2002.
The tar command doesn’t support the -z and -j flags for compressed tarballs. Some console programs will not output more than 80 columns per line.
There’s an initscript facility in AIX called SRC, but it doesn’t support service dependencies, and there’s no service-specific stop script. The only difference between starting a regular script in the background and starting an SRC script is that the latter process is detached from the current shell.
AIX has a very comprehensive configuration frontend called smit or smitty (the former uses a hilariously primitive graphical frontend when running in X). The SMIT panels are written in some strange pre-xml markup language, and they serve as a convenient way to avoid memorizing command flags. All SMIT really does is synthesize and run the proper shell command for your specified operation.
The smitty interface is an ncurses-style interface that works pretty well but could use some more precise wording and/or extended help messages. There’s also a web-based SMIT interface called WebSMIT that’s pretty neat I guess, but it’s a mostly broken piece of crap.
When I was having problems configuring networking on AIX, I was told that “it just works” when you use smitty. I didn’t know that “it just works” entails basic network settings magically changing after a reboot. While showing an AIX veteran how I was trying to set up the network, I got to the point where I was about to configure my default route in smitty. “Wait,” he said. “Never configure default routes in smitty, that doesn’t work.”
These people go on and on about how Linux is hard to administer because you have to edit config files and every distribution is different. I was told that I was having problems configuring AIX because I was trying to do everything the hard way like on Linux. I respectfully disagree… at least when I save /etc/conf.d/net, I know that its contents won’t magically change when I reboot (for kernel upgrades).
AIX is interesting from an operating system design perspective, but compared to Linux, it’s barely usable. Solaris is much more usable, perhaps better than Linux in certain respects. They’re all significantly different from one another as to make migration a bit of an experience.
Most people enable this vi mode for command line editing that’s really clunky.
Clumsy, yes but we use it because we can rely on it being there on every unix we admin. Not so for zsh or even bash.
The tar command doesn’t support the -z and -j flags for compressed tarballs.
So compress it yourself. Again you can’t rely on the -z option being there on every unix, better to play it safe.
$ tar -cvf – ./whatever | compress -c > myfile.tar.Z
There’s an initscript facility in AIX called SRC
The advantage of the system resource controller is that it can automatically restart services if they stop. You can also define services yourself and provide a stop script for these. See man for mkssys.
While showing an AIX veteran how I was trying to set up the network, I got to the point where I was about to configure my default route in smitty. “Wait,” he said. “Never configure default routes in smitty, that doesn’t work.”
That’s because it will remove the routes, but the routing info is still in the ODM and will reappear on reboot. Yep this one is a pain. You might want to check with odmget after making changes.
Forget about software installation, I just let other people take care of that for me. I don’t know where to find binary filesets for AIX, and I’m not too excited about building from source using the included gcc-2.95.
Linux toolkit for AIX contains a lot of the popular open source software in reasonably up to date versions :
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/aix/products/aixos/linux/download.htm…
And ofcourse there’s the Public Domain Software Library for AIX of the university of California :
http://aixpdslib.seas.ucla.edu/index.html
Another good site to check out is http://www.rootvg.net
The linux toolkit stuff is provided as RPMs. Those should be familiar to you.
AIX is interesting from an operating system design perspective, but compared to Linux, it’s barely usable. Solaris is much more usable, perhaps better than Linux in certain respects. They’re all significantly different from one another as to make migration a bit of an experience.
AIX has it faults but your conclusion sys to me that you have not explored the full power of AIX. Maybbe you don’t need it. The built in LVM is a lot better than anything Linux provides, device management is much much easier, installation of upgrades (service levels) is a breeze, logical partitioning is stil in its infancy on Linux.
I used AIX at my last position (over two years ago) and found smitty to be a life saver (coming from a Solaris/Linux/Windows background). Try installing a fileset from the command line in AIX and you will soon learn to appreciate smitty, especially the smitty.log which logs the actual command line when you run the command. For the fileset install it would be installp and the longest list of options I have ever seen.
Compared to Linux (my experience is mostly RedHat), Solaris, SCO Unix, and limited HP-UX (no I did not use SAM), AIX has by far the best integrated system administration tools available. I have found that some things are easier to do in AIX, some Solaris, and some Linux.
I don’t care for AIX’s logging at all, I don’t know if that has been improved since AIX 4.3, since I only had a limited time to play with 5L 5.2 and we were looking at the security functionality and its affects on SAP and Oracle.
Once you get past the basic commands each *nix variant does its own thing. That is why I have a copy of the O’Reilly book “Essential System Administration” available, especially if you are working on AIX and the man pages were not installed (and let’s not go into the installation of AIX)! Once can’t possibly remember all of the commands for every *nix variant.
I agree with the document’s premise that Linux & Unix skills are transferrable, even to AIX, but the message from AIX sales and from AIX shops is: “Get lost.” They don’t believe in the transferrability of skills… or at least they actively campaign against the idea whether they believe in it or not. There’s a distasteful exclusionist mentality, at least around here, that keeps “mere Unix people” from being considered for AIX positions. And as for Linux… Oh! My! The outright hostility! It’s hilarious the dimensions it takes. Maybe IBM could publish a document on how to deprogram AIX people, especially the managers of AIX shops as well as their own sales staff.