Migration installation is the way to migrate systems from one version of an operating system (OS) level to another OS version. This method of installation preserves all user data configurations and file systems. Migration installation can be done in various ways and this article provides steps for migrating system from one version to another version.
View entire articleIBM Systems Director is a platform management solution that is used to manage physical and virtual systems in a multi-system environment. It supports various virtualization technologies and multiple operating systems across IBM and non-IBM platforms. This tutorial explains basic steps, tips and tricks to automate REST API testing for IBM Systems Director using Java? code.
View entire articleProtect your business data on AIX systems using immutability and appendOnly features supported by IBM General Parallel File System V3.4 ensuring compliance to various government regulations. Having rich set of command line interfaces, GPFS allows you to set appropriate restrictions to your business audit files, health center records and log files in order to effectively secure them from being tampered or accidentally deleted. This article illustrates how to make use of immutability and appendOnly restrictions offered by IBM GPFS V3.4 to protect your AIX data.
View entire articleSWIG is a nifty open source tool that lets you integrate C/C++ code with just about any mainstream scripting language. Among other things, it exposes the code base to a wider audience, improves testability, and lets a portion of your Ruby code base run off high-performance C/C++ modules.
View entire articleVersioned Workload Partitions (WPARs) is a new revolution in the area of WPARs in the IBM AIX® operating system. Applications that are supported in existing operating systems can also be configured to run in Versioned WPARs. However, there can be issues while configuring and running the same applications in Versioned WPARs. This article addresses trouble shooting of problems that might occur when common applications such as IBM WebSphere® Application Server, IBM DB2® and others are started in Versioned WPARs. This article also discusses the performance comparison of applications and benefits of moving an existing setup(on older hardware) to new IBM POWER7® hardware in the form of Versioned WPARs.
View entire articleThis article provides insight to a migration exercise in clustered production environment and covers issues and resolutions on the way to successfully achieving the migration of complex network deployment configuration from IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment (ND) V6 to V7 on AIX 6.1 platform. The WebSphere and AIX system administrators would benefit most from this article as these migration issues may occur in one form or the other.
View entire articleThis introduction to text manipulation on UNIX platforms provides an overview of some common commands widely available and installed standard on most UNIX-based releases. Many times these standard utilities are ignored in favor of more modern text-processors such as Perl, Python, or Ruby, which are not always installed on a system. An introductory review of these tools helps practitioners who are learning UNIX or Linux or those who may be looking to renew forgotten knowledge.
View entire articleIf you're up against a performance problem on the IBM AIX operating system, your most important task is to diagnose it correctly. When a user tells you "the system is running slowly," it's time for some detective work. You need to know what questions to ask to help you pinpoint the real issue. The first article of this two-part series demonstrates how describing a performance problem can help you identify the bottlenecks. Part 2 will look at some good practices that help prevent those bottlenecks in the first place.
View entire articleHave you found yourself doing some kind of troubleshooting on servers which you have never touched before? Nowadays, working in huge companies or even as a consultant, you might not be able to avoid such situations. To avoid mistakes in VIOS and LPAR environments, this article will simply show you how to map disk devices within VIOS server without caring about name patterns. In the end, you will see how name patterns are important and how to bypass them if required.
View entire articleThe alt_disk_copy utility can be used to migrate your rootvg disks to new hardware. This method is practicable when you do not have the facility or resource of using remote network installs.
View entire articleRecovering or building new machines running AIX is a straightforward process when you use Storix.
View entire articleAlthough SAN technology has taken the limelight when it comes to storage solutions, AIX systems still need to use internal storage. Whether you have small stand-alone servers or use a full system partition with all the resources available pooled together, internal storage is the typical medium for root volume groups and other smaller file system utilization. But when these disks are not planned out well, I/O bottlenecks, inefficient space utilization, and slower performance can occur. Learn how to optimize internal storage and lay things out properly.
View entire articleIn this article, the author discusses the needs that drive migration of data centers into the cloud, details the role of virtualization in both public and private cloud infrastructures, and outlines the security and compliance implications of cloud computing in order to provide insight into the protection of sensitive data in the cloud through "administrative access" and "privileged delegation."
View entire articleTripwire is an intrusion detection system that monitors for file or directory changes based on the policy provided by the system administrator.
View entire articleShared Ethernet adapters (SEAs) can be used for IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging. However, once the SEA is in use, you cannot make changes to the VLANs on the trunk virtual Ethernet adapter without stopping the SEA. By using separate virtual adapters for each tagged VLAN, you can attach a new virtual adapter with its new VLAN to the SEA without any downtime. Retiring a VLAN from the SEA can be just as easy with a modular approach: one tagged VLAN per virtual adapter.
View entire articleIBM Power Systems are built to stay powered up. On those rare occasions that a Power System does get powered down, it pays to be prepared when it comes time to start it up again. The logical partitions (LPARs) need to be activated, and it can be challenging to start them in the correct order. There is a simple way to establish your LPAR startup order: create a system profile via the Hardware Management Console (HMC). System profiles also alert you to resource conflicts between LPAR profiles. In addition, you can use system profiles to reconfigure server hardware quickly and easily.
View entire articleLightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) is a subset of the x.500 directory access protocol. LDAP maintains information of different objects and can be represented as user names, group names, file names, and more. The LDAP protocol allows the exchange of information between the LDAP client and LDAP server. Applications make use of the LDAP client to interact with LDAP servers to get the information for application request. This article can be used as a quick reference for understanding LDAP client features in AIX 6.1 and 7.1 releases.
View entire articleDiscover a powerful alternative to POSIX and Windows-based threads - Intel Threading Building Blocks, a C++ based framework design specifically for parallel programming.
View entire articleThis article shows you how to use CICS Transaction Gateway in an AIX environment that supports workload partitions (WPARs). It includes scenarios that show you how to use WPARs to consolidate existing hardware or to extend a CICS Transaction Gateway instance.
View entire articleAuthentication mechanism verifies which users are allowed to access a system. Administrator can define authentication protocol; based on that protocol, users' credentials are verified, and users are given access to the system. AIX provides several authentication and identification modules. A user's authentication and identification are done based on the user's attributes on AIX. This article covers the user's authentication and identification attributes, load modules available in AIX, and a new authentication attribute introduced AIX 6.1 Tl07 and AIX 7.1 Tl1 releases.
View entire articleThe most popular innovation of AIX 6.1 was clearly workload partitioning (WPARs). Once you get past the marketing hype, you'll need to determine the value that WPARs can provide in your environment. What can WPARs do that logical partitions (LPARs) could not? How and when should you use WPARs? Equally as important, when should you not use workload partitioning? Finally, how do you create, configure and administer workload partitions? These are some of the topics that we'll discuss in this article, and we'll look at some of the WPAR enhancements in AIX 7.1.
View entire articleAs a social networking medium, Twitter is a lot of fun. But with a bit of command-line savvy, the right API, and your programming language of choice, it can also be powerful. Learn how to access the Twitter platform to build useful and fun command-line applications.
View entire articleDiscover the syntax used by the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) command-line interface (CLI). Get a feel for VIOS commands, their intuitive flags, and how close the VIOS commands are to IBM AIX operating system commands. If you know AIX, VIOS commands are easy to learn. If you're not familiar with AIX, learning to navigate the VIOS is a great stepping stone to understanding AIX better.
View entire articleUSB memory sticks are cheap, cheap, cheap. As long as your hardware has USB slots, using these memory sticks is an option to consider for files that require fast reads, large data copies, or temporary file storage. This article demonstrates how to mount a USB stick on your AIX box and use it for storage.
View entire articleEditing a critical system file such as /etc/passwd can be tempting, but if something goes wrong, your system can become unusable. The IBM AIX operating system provides several commands and System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) menus to help you manage system files without having to edit them directly. Built-in AIX commands can also check syntax before updating critical files, offering you extra protection for files you can't afford to lose.
View entire articleManagement of system administration is always a tedious task. Various tools and methods are available to handle administrative activities on a system. AIX 6.1 provides different security features that help to manage user and group administration and maintain integrity on a system. This articles provides a list commands which are enabled using these features.
View entire articleFrom AIX 6.1 onwards, user created filesystems can now be encrypted, which is implemented at the file system level. This approach allows for some applications to be encrypted, with not much overhead maintenance. One such product that can be used for data encryption is DB2. The need to encrypt application data is becoming more common, especially if backups are taken and are moved off site, or the application resides on external sites. SOX even recommends that to maintain the confidentially of the data, encryption should be strongly considered. This article demonstrates how to create a DB2 database and encrypt it under AIX and looks at common EFS commands.
View entire articleThe Boost C++ libraries make it easier to write good code, but what happens when something goes wrong? Discover the Boost Serialization library and learn how to employ serialization in your code to make debugging easier in the future.
View entire articleThis article discusses the method for assigning physical path priorities to virtual scsi paths on VIO servers based on even/odd numbers associated with each disk and each path to disk. The script is useful in a virtualized environment utilizing VIO servers with MPIO on the client LPARs. This script also provides a system administrator with the ability to load balance manually SAN traffic from a client LPARs between dual VIO servers and across all physical adapters on the VIO server.
View entire articleChris Gibson shares some tips for implementing NPIV in an AIX and Virtual I/O Server environment on IBM POWER7 systems.
View entire articleGet a comprehensive introduction on how to lock down your AIX environment, including LDAP servers.
View entire articleThe purpose of this article is to show how an AIX server can be configured to filter TCP/IP traffic using the operating systems built-in filtering capabilities. Audience for this article includes server and network administrators in the need of restricting the network traffic allowed to flow in and out of a server. This article applies to a broad set of scenarios, from hardening critical midrange database servers running in internal networks, to securing border servers handling Internet traffic, like web, DNS or email servers.
View entire articleIf you have more than one AIX server that uses local user accounts, you probably have some inconsistent user ID (UID) and group ID (GID) numbers across the different systems. This article explains how to standardize your UID and GID numbers across all of your AIX systems so that they are consistent.
View entire articleSecurity isn't an exact science, so the more difficulties you can put in a hacker's way, the better. This article considers how to enhance Secure Shell (SSH) access by eliminating passwords and using public/private key pairs instead. The article also explores how to recognize and block possible attacks, including brute-force and dictionary attacks, by denying server access to origins that are identified as unsafe.
View entire articleIt's never a matter of if a disk will fail, but when. So, what do you do when you're awakened at 2 o'clock in the morning because of file system, LVM, or SAN errors on an IBM AIX server? Or, better yet, how do you prevent them from waking you up in the first place? This article looks at strategies for managing disk resources to maximize availability, performance, and redundancy and provides techniques on how to recover from failures when good disks go bad.
View entire articleThis article provides data in simplified terms for using Domain RBAC to gain granular access on resources and objects. It also gives examples on implementing domain RBAC on resources.
View entire articleThe Boost C++ libraries make it easier to write good code. Learn the features of Boost header files and discover helpful utilities like compressed pairs and non-copyable classes, as well as how to handle failed assertions.
View entire articleThe root volume group (rootvg) is the lifeblood of your IBM AIX system. It contains the AIX operating system, but you can use it for a lot more than that. A rootvg may include paging space, system dump devices, data file systems, a copy of mksysb backups, a second instance of AIX (when you use multibos), and more. With all of those possible demands on the rootvg disk, it is a good idea to keep data file systems in their own volume group and give rootvg the space it needs.
View entire articlePerl is a powerful scripting language that can be used to perform small operations from the command line or power a complete web portal. Understanding techniques for making safe and secure Perl CGI scripts is vital to developing a web portal that does not compromise the integrity of a server or the web site's data. This article explains several techniques that will help developers create secure Perl CGI scripts and handle errors, before looking at a simpler method for building web applications like portals using the Plack system.
View entire articleAre you moving away from Oracle or Sun Microsystems equipment to IBM System p servers? Are you more familiar with zones and LDOMs than HMCs and VIO servers? This article provides practical tips for migrating from Solaris to IBM AIX servers.
View entire articleLeverage information management facilities of IBM Scaled Out Network Attached Storage(IBM SONAS) to keep AIX data managed. IBM SONAS provides you with data placement, migration and deletion policies to ease your burden of Information Lifecycle Management for AIX data and helps ensure compliance to government regulations. This article takes a deep dive to illustrate how responsibilities of AIX data management are efficiently delegated to IBM SONAS.
View entire articleAIX has an event notification mechanism using file system interfaces, which is called the AIX Event Infrastructure. Cluster Aware AIX uses this to monitor cluster events, so that the failure detection time is reduced. The events happening on one node of the cluster are notified to all nodes in the cluster, and corrective action can be easily taken.
View entire articleFor scripts to be reasonably robust, one of the conditions that should ideally be met is the ability to clean up any temporary logs or processes left lying around from a forceful termination. Another element to consider is when an interrupt from a user is received, what appropriate action should be taken? With the shell built-in trap command and the logger utility, these can help to provide your scripts with more robustness when a script is forcefully terminated. In this article, I will demonstrate ways trap and logger can be used.
View entire articleOften businesses and government agencies need to run COBOL programs faster by running them as multithreaded applications. In reality, COBOL multithreading comes with some limitations. In this article, the author explains the pitfalls of limitations and how to handle them.
View entire articleMigrating data from one LPAR to another can be challenging. You need to set aside some disk space on the new LPAR and create file systems. And whether you choose to copy the data across the network or do a backup and restore, a large amount of data can take many hours to move. Wouldn't it be good if you could gift wrap your data, send it to a new LPAR, and then unwrap it ready to use? The IBM AIX operating system Logical Volume Manager (LVM) lets you do just that by exporting a volume group from one LPAR and importing it to another one.
View entire articlePluggable authentication module (PAM) supports authentication mechanism. Applications can make use of this module for implementing authentication mechanism in AIX. PAM provides different service modules, and each module supports different functionality. Make use of these PAM service modules to enable PAM with authentication, account, password, and session management mechanisms in AIX.
View entire articleHave you ever built a web application that performed sluggishly, because you tried to display too many columns or rows? Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology that allows large, complex web applications to perform robustly, even though they have large amounts of data to process or display. In this article, we will show you how to install Moonlight on BSD UNIX and then build an application with hundreds of columns and thousands of rows using Moonlight. No prior Moonlight experience is required.
View entire articleTCP Wrappers allows system administrators to control and log incoming TCP-based connections to the local host run from inetd.conf. TCP wrappers, often called wrappers, can lock down popular TCP inbound clients on your AIX box quickly. Find out how wrappers can easily protect and secure your machines.
View entire articleUsing the AIX audit produces a lot of records that are triggered by the configured events on the system. These events need to be kept for an external audit reviewer. However, for day-to-day internal reports, a lot of these events can be filtered out, and the remaining records can be used to produce a more centered, daily audit report. AIX provides the auditselect utility to extract records; however, if you know what record types you need extracted, then the awk utility suffices.
View entire articleThis article helps to understand the Active Memory Expansion concept and how to use the amepat tool to achieve the benefits of Active Memory Expansion.
View entire articleErlang is destined for great things in the age of multi-core, due to its unique process loving architecture and functional nature. In this article, you can learn the basics about programming in Erlang.
View entire articleMigrating or copying data is a frequent task that system administrators carry out often. There are various tools available for these tasks, including cp, tar, and cplv.
View entire articleYou can configure your brand new IBM Power Systems server without getting up from your seat. Learn how to build your virtual I/O server, a network installation manager server, and your AIX partitions remotely.
View entire articleBreak out the caffeine, elbow grease, and your text editor. It's time to turn your UNIX shell into a hot rod. It's time for an extreme shell makeover.
View entire articleIn this second article in a two-part series on multithreaded structures, learn about design choices for implementing a mutex based concurrent list, and discover how to design concurrent data structures without mutexes.
View entire articleThis article provides an overview of end-to-end data protection as provided by implementing the T10 standard data integrity field (DIF). In addition, it provides configuration information and restrictions based on the current implementation for Power Systems. Reading this article provides the information required to set up a Power System for T10 DIF within the current constraints and an overview of how it is implemented.
View entire articleEveryone is talking about parallel computing; it's all the rage. In this first article of a two-part series on multithreaded structures, learn how to design concurrent data structures in a multithreaded environment using the POSIX library.
View entire articleThe AIX Event Infrastructure is an extensible framework for monitoring multiple types of system events. This article gives an overview of the monitoring interface, as well as pointers for writing event monitoring applications.
View entire articleThis article provides a structure, configuration, and methodology for building and maintaining an automated wiki server for your AIX technical documentation. One of the most difficult tasks associated with system administration is maintaining a centralized documentation repository and enforcing standards for documentation in the repository. The wiki environment helps to create a standardized look-and-feel for your documentation repository and provides an easy to maintain environment for all contributors to the repository.
View entire articleAccess control lists (ACL) let you fine tune permissions of files and directories beyond the normal standard permission settings, as found with the chmod command.
View entire articleThe Boost C++ libraries make concurrent programming fun and straightforward. Learn how to use two of the Boost libraries - the Interprocess (IPC) library and the Message Passing Interface (MPI) - to implement functionality, such as shared memory objects, synchronized file locking, and distributed communication.
View entire articleCapturing screen images of applications is something that all technical writers, most graphical application developers, many technical marketing staff members, and even many users need to do. Modern UNIX systems provide a number of different tools to capture graphical screens and single windows. This article, the final of three-part series, focuses on graphical tools that are available for most Linux and UNIX systems. These tools make it easy to capture graphical portions of the screen to help illustrate both proper and improper program behavior.
View entire articleCapturing screen images of applications is something that all technical writers, most graphical application developers, many technical marketing staff members, and even many users need to do. Modern UNIX systems provide a number of different tools to capture graphical screens and single windows. This article, the second of three, focuses on tools that are present on every Linux and UNIX system that uses the X Window System. These tools make it easy to capture graphical portions of the screen to help illustrate both proper and improper program behavior.
View entire articleThe AIX Security Expert (AIXPert) makes implementing security a breeze, but it does have some traps for the uninitiated. Once you're aware of them, AIXPert is a natural choice for security hardening. So, if you want to secure your system without leaving yourself locked out in the rain, this article is for you.
View entire articleGain an overview of SSL configuration for IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6.0 on the AIX 5L operating system. Learn about command line configuration steps for SSL key database creation, certificate creation, certificate extraction, SSL authentication mechanisms, troubleshooting for SSL issues, and steps to perform LDAP client-server communication.
View entire articleManaging the source code for a software development project is only slightly less important than writing it in the first place. UNIX and Linux systems offer a rich selection of version control system (VCS) packages, each of which takes a slightly different approach to this common concern. This article focuses on the Mercurial source code management system, often simply referred to as hg. Mercurial provides a powerful, modern, and light-weight solution for source code control that makes it easy for developers to make and debug their changes to a software project while maintaining a stable, centralized source code repository that all project members can depend upon.
View entire articleVirtualization is a modern approach for enhancing a system's ability for sharing system resources to ensure provisioning can readily meet business requirements. Agile development helps us ascertain stakeholder inputs with changing business and market requirements in software development. This article explains different virtualization technologies that can be used in agile software product development life cycle.
View entire articleIf you're one of the many users of the GCC C++ compiler, you should be aware of the new features that the upcoming C++0x specification has in store and available in GCC version 4.5.
View entire articleA multitude of libraries have been written for UNIX systems. Many of those libraries have been released using open source licenses that allow a library's source code to be reused in new projects. By porting an existing library to a new platform, a developer may be able to save the time it would take to duplicate the development work to achieve the same functionality on the new platform. This is the first of a two-part article series on porting the OpenLDAP client libraries to the iOS. Part 1 walks the reader through the steps of importing the OpenLDAP source code into Xcode and building two static libraries for the iOS. Using the Xcode project created in Part 1, Part 2 will guide the reader through the creation a simple iOS application that executes basic queries to an LDAP server using the OpenLDAP libraries.
View entire articleIn UNIX, everything can be a file, but not every file is stored the same way. A file system dictates how a file is decomposed and organized on media. Historically, media meant tape or disk. But increasingly, file systems now translate virtually any source - remote server, archive file, even other file systems - into virtual media. Here's a look at some novel file systems.
View entire articleThis guide will assist a client in making the decision on identifying and deciding on which path control module to use in their AIX environment. The major functions for path control or multipathing are discussed and compared.
View entire articleAre you a new UNIX(R) administrator who needs to be able to run communication over a network in the most secure fashion possible? Brush up on the basics, learn the intricate details of SSH, and delve into the advanced capabilities of SSH to automate securely your daily system maintenance, remote system management, and use within advanced scripts to manage multiple hosts.
View entire articleProviding a secure communication conduit implies many different issues and problems, such as how you provide an effective communication channel that is capable of handling multiple streams of information. Using the GNU Virtual Private Ethernet (GVPE) provides an alternative to the normal single or multiple channel solutions by effectively emulating the entire network stack and allowing you to build TCP, UDP and other network technologies on top of the virtual environment. This article examines ways of using GVPE with your applications to provide communication, and of using GVPE with your Web sites to provide secure connectivity over private and public networks. In particular, you'll learn about using GVPE with distributed infrastructure projects, such as Amazon EC2, clouds, or public/private web performance deployments.
View entire articleThe command line isn't suitable for every user. Indeed, some users may only feel comfortable when armed with a mouse. To accommodate those users or build custom desktop applications using only the shell, add GUIs to your scripts. Here's how you can do it.
View entire articleWhat do you do when things don't exactly work as planned? How do you tackle those really good, head-scratching problems in AIX where servers don't seem to work right? In this article, you'll learn the basic skills of troubleshooting AIX in practical, day-to-day situations.
View entire articleThe vi (visual) text editor is the oldest screen-oriented editor that is still provided by default on all UNIX, Linux, and other UNIX-like systems. Due to some combination of its age and its underlying editing model, vi doesn't always get the respect that it deserves, but it is an incredibly fast and dependable tool that every UNIX and Linux administrator should know how to use. Vim (vi improved) is a commonly-used modern clone of vi and extends the capabilities of vi in a variety of ways while remaining backward compatible. This article explains how to customize vi and Vim in multiple ways, ranging from simple configuration settings to defining your own commands.
View entire articleThis three-part series on AIX 7 networking focuses on the challenges of optimizing network performance. With AIX 7 being used more frequently in network deployment environments, and with common use of workload partitions to help manage resources, you should be aware of all the different applications and environments you need to optimize your network deployment. Part 1 provided a networking overview and also discussed the tools you need to monitor your hardware, including netstat, netpmon, entstat, and nmon. Part 2 discussed monitoring and tuning NFS subsystems. This final segment, Part 3, shows you how to monitor network packets. The series also offers best practices for network I/O performance tuning.
View entire articleThis article can teach you how to configure and troubleshoot LPM. It also includes a brief explanation of LPM basic concepts, troubleshooting problems, and easy to fix solutions for assorted problems.
View entire articlePowerHA Smart Assist validates applications before getting them configured. Smart Assists require applications to be installed in a certain way; instructions are available in user guides of specific applications. For WebSphere Application Server Smart Assist to discover WebSphere Application Server application running on cluster machines, users should follow the installation instructions for WebSphere Application Server in "Smart Assist for WebSphere User's Guide". Otherwise, WebSphere Application Server Smart Assist may not discover WebSphere Application Server running on cluster nodes. There are many instances wherein users face problems with WebSphere Application Server Smart Assist despite following steps in the user guide. These issues are not problems with WebSphere Application Server Smart Assist or WebSphere Application Server application itself, but they might arise due to WebSphere Application Server Smart Assist not integrating with WebSphere Application Server configuration with PowerHA. This article can help you with frequently encountered problems with WebSphere Application Server Smart Assist.
View entire articleThis article provides detailed instructions for integrating Tivoli Access Manager version 6.1 and Tivoli Integrated Portal version 1.1.x. Explore how to configure single sign-on between Tivoli Access Manager/WebSEAL and Tivoli Integrated Portal using Tivoli Access Manager Extended Trust Association Interceptor (ETai). Step-by-step instructions and plenty of code examples walk you through the tasks.
View entire articleIBM Systems Director is the core IBM platform management product for managing data center devices. A default Systems Director installation includes the Apache Derby database as its data repository. If your environment has more than 500 devices under management, it's highly recommended you switch to a full-fledge database management system, such as IBM DB2. This article will show you how to prepare the DB2 instance and database and how to make the switch in conformance with DB2 best practices.
View entire articleThis three-part series on AIX 7 networking focuses on the challenges of optimizing network performance. With AIX 7 being used more frequently in network deployment environments and with common use of workload partitions to help manage your resources, you must be aware of all the different applications and environments you need to optimize your network deployment. Part 2 focuses on tuning NFS. You'll learn about monitoring utilities such as nfsstat and nmon, and you'll also tune with nfso. The series also offers best practices for network I/O performance tuning.
View entire articleAIX 6.1 Workload Partitions (WPARs) can be moved from one LPAR to another. Prior to AIX 6.1 TL4, moving a WPAR from one LPAR to another relied on common NFS-mounted filesystems between two AIX LPARs. However, the dependency on NFS services for WPAR mobility has been problematic. To eliminate this dependency, SAN-based system WPARs (also called rootvg WPARs) were introduced in AIX 6.1 TL4. In this article, we cover SAN-based system WPARs and the system configuration required to setup these WPARs. We will also discuss migration of SAN-based system WPARs using IBM Director 6.1.2 with WPAR manager plug-in.
View entire articleThis three-part series on AIX 7 networking focuses on the challenges of optimizing network performance. With AIX 7 and the new POWER7 architecture, you have to think about the performance of your system, and also the effects of your network performance on both LPAR and WPAR environments. In the first installment, you'll review some best practices for network configuration and utilize those practices for efficient monitoring of your hardware by taking advantage of network tools such as netstat, netpmon, entstat, and nmon. You'll also examine certain tools used to look at your interfaces to see how to configure them.
View entire articleThe cd command you use to change directories is one of the first UNIX shell commands you learn, and it's remarkably versatile. Learn some shortcuts that make it even easier for you to zip around between directories. Also, find out how to make good use of some common variables that help cd work for you.
View entire articleGet an introduction to swap (paging) space, learn how to configure and administer it, capture statistics, and tune your Virtual Memory Manager (VMM) settings to provide for optimum swap (paging) space configuration and performance. With AIX 7, and the improvements for the POWER7 architecture, extracting the best performance out of your memory environment is critical. With the larger memory capacity and CPU cores, a better understanding of the VMM and your configuration will help you change your parameters to fit your requirements.
View entire articleHave you ever been perplexed on how to configure networking devices on AIX servers? Confused by the ins and outs of default routes, IP aliases, and logical versus physical devices? In this article, you can get the basics of configuring network devices and learn how to get your System p servers communicating.
View entire articleLearn the scenarios in which remapping, copying, and reuse of SAN disks is allowed and supported. More easily switch AIX environments from one system to another and help achieve higher availability and reduced down time. These scenarios also allow for fast deployment of new systems using cloning.
View entire articleLearn how to extend the popular and versatile Vim editor to suit your systems administration needs using Vim's custom scripting language and options such as Perl and Python.
View entire articleUse ps, sar, svmon, and vmstat to monitor memory usage and analyze the results. This three-part series focuses on the various aspects of memory management and tuning on IBM System p servers running AIX 7, including taking advantage of the POWER7 CPU to improve memory usage within LPARs. Part 2 of the series focuses on the detail of actual memory subsystem monitoring and discusses how to analyze the results. Throughout the series, we also cover some of the best practices of memory performance tuning and monitoring.
View entire articleGo beyond scale up and use the power of scale out via IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (IBM SONAS). IBM SONAS easily integrates with existing UNIX environments and can be deployed instantaneously for business data storage. This article introduces you to the basic IBM SONAS setup and how it can be leveraged in UNIX environment like AIX for centralized data storage.
View entire articleAIX 7 takes advantage of the POWER7 CPU to improve memory usage within LPARs. While memory tuning might be more difficult to implement than processor or disk tuning, it is no less important. You can do more to tune memory on an AIX 7 server than on any other subsystem. Changing some memory parameters on your system can increase performance dramatically, particularly when these parameters are not optimized for the environment which you are running. This three-part series on memory tuning dives right into tuning parameters focusing on the many challenges and the various best practices of optimizing memory performance, and it also discusses some improvements in AIX 6 and AIX 7. Part 1 provides an overview of memory on AIX 7, including a discussion of virtual memory and the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM).
View entire articlePart 3 of the AIX 7 performance series covers how to improve overall file system performance, how to tune your systems with the ioo command, and how to use the filemon and fileplace utilities. You will also learn about JFS and JFS2 that is available in AIX 7.
View entire articleDiscover how to use appropriate disk placement prior to creating your logical volumes to improve disk performance. These investigations are based on AIX 7 beta and updating information from the original AIX 5L version of this article. Part 2 of this series focuses on monitoring your logical volumes and the commands and utilities (iostat, lvmstat, lslv, lspv, lsvg) used to analyze results.
View entire articleGnuPG (gpg) is a free encryption package, originally based on the Open PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) project. Users can encrypt and send files to trusted users, providing the file was encrypted with the intended recipients' public key. The recipient then uses their own private key to decrypt the file.
View entire articleIf you're new to Linux or UNIX administration and want to get up to speed on bash scripting techniques, or you're a Windows engineer running something like a Cygwin UNIX sub-shell on your system, you need to know the hows, whys, and how-to's for bash shell scripting. Learn everyday usage of bash on a UNIX or Linux system; see how to become a bash power user by chaining bash commands together; and dive into variables, syntax structure, and loops in bash.
View entire articleLearn more about configuring and monitoring AIX 7 based on the investigations of AIX 7 beta compared to the original articles based on AIX 5L. The article covers the support for direct I/O, concurrent I/O, asynchronous I/O, and best practices for each method of I/O implementation. This three-part series on the AIX disk and I/O subsystem focuses on the challenges of optimizing disk I/O performance. While disk tuning is arguably less exciting than CPU or memory tuning, it is a crucial component in optimizing server performance. In fact, partly because disk I/O is your weakest subsystem link, you can do more to improve disk I/O performance than on any other subsystem.
View entire articleRestrict access to SSH users connecting to your host by utilising the users, group, and deny/allow stanzas. TCP Wrappers can also be used on a host-by-host basis.
View entire articleCatastrophically bad code can be written in any language, including the elegant and powerful Python language. In this article, we explore how thinking about testing actually produces dramatically different Python code. Lastly, we learn how to measure scientifically the difference.
View entire articleUNIX provides a number of technologies for interprocess communication, or cooperative computing between two or more applications. Shared memory is the fastest and most flexible of the techniques and is surprisingly easy to implement.
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