Submitted by For only the second time since Big Blue entered the Unix market for real in February 1990 with the launch of the RS/6000 line of workstations and servers, the company is letting customers who use its Power-based servers take a future AIX release for a test drive in an open beta program
Any ideas of AIX will work on Apple G5 hardware?
I’m not really familiar with AIX, used it once for about 10 minutes about 5 years ago. Does AIX offer anything substantial feature wise (other then the obvious binary compatibility with existing AIX software) that Linux/Solaris do not?
It will not
would be cool if it did though.
AIX offers a very good mission critical system built for IBM’s POWER chips. so its highly targeted to it’s hardware, it’s very secure, it’s very fast, and a bunch of other stuff.
Edited 2010-07-15 17:49 UTC
I agree with most of what you say but it’s the secure part I’m definitely not in agreement with. The default install leaves things like FTP and Telnet ports open by default plus all the remote management software runs as root.
The worst culprit of all, in my opinion, is the ssh implementation. It’s always at least several versions behind the latest release and last time I looked, it didn’t come installed by default. In fact, you had to download it from sourceforge.
One thing that has always annoyed me is the hardware management console, an X86 system running a cut down Linux that is used to manage all your POWER based systems on your network. It’s also insecure by default and once you have control of this one machine, you can give yourself root access to any machine.
So all in all, very sloppy security by IBM.
“The default install leaves things like FTP and Telnet ports open by default…”
I know version 5 had this issue, but I don’t know if version 6 (and i am certain version 7) no longer does that. come to think of it i think version 6 left those open. 7 is more secure though. but you have a lot of very valid points.
Besides the HMC which under normal circumstances needs physical access to, that telnet and ftp is open by default is not that bad, just remember to turn them off.
SSH came with all my AIX machines by default, except for version 4. But it must be 3 years since I touched them, but worked on them and other unixes for 4 years
Actually starting with AIX 6, AIX has a “Secure by default” installation option that installs AIX with no services started. The idea is that you would use the AIX Security Expert feature of AIX configure the security settings on that server and then optionally you could transport an XML profile to other servers to replicate those security settings.
AIX v7 scales better now. Earlier versions of AIX had no good scaling. POWER servers used to have fewer and high clocked cpus, therefore AIX had no need to scale better. But with the new POWER7, it has 8 cores just like the old Niagara SPARC. So AIX had to be rewritten to scale well, using all 8 cores in each CPU.
I wonder how well AIX scales now? Only slightly better than earlier AIX or is the vertical scaling as bad as in Linux? To scale vertically is very hard to do. To scale horizontally is easy, just add another node to your network – this is Linux strength.
(BTW, Solaris have scaled well on many cpus and cores, for many years).
AIX has not much to offer as a Workstation os for anyone who knows OS X and Linux. But as a server AIX is pretty cool. It has massive support for virtualization which makes even vmware look primitive and all disk management is second only to Solaris 10.
AIX is pretty cool, has nice tools and performance tools and reporting tools that puts others to shame. But it’s package system is primitive, working on the OS is pretty primitive. I would take Solaris 10 and Linux. The biggest drawback is of course that Power machines are extremely expensive.
But you can get machines and virtualization that nothing comes close to. You not only can have machines with what seems unlimited memory and cpu’s, you can slice each cpu down to a fraction, you have similar to hyper threading for each sliced cpu.
If I could afford it I would use AIX but in real life I doubt it.
Just for the record: You can do the same with Solaris on the OS level, which means very good resource management also on x86.
Will it work in Hercules emulator? http://www.hercules-390.org/
Or IBM’s Full-System emulator for PowerPC 970? http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/systemsim970
Or qemu?
SMITTY was pretty cool… 10 years ago… I was always amused by the little running man animation in the X version.
As usual – ‘test program’ which expects you to have so weird dev accounts, pay some fees, have some spacecraft in your garage … too bad they’re just too close to release a simple ‘trial’ to test the software on your own.
There are no fees and the only account is a free IBM ID needed for the Developerworks site. You do have to have a POWER4 or later server to carve out a little resource for an LPAR to install the beta code into.