How to determine the differences between two AIX V5.3 images

The AIX V6.1 Runtime Expert (which became available 10/23/2009) can compare the configuration of a running AIX V6.1 system with a Runtime Expert profile.

The AIX-config web page bills itself as an AIX complete configuration gathering tool. It can potentially be used to determine the differences between two AIX images.

The IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager is a discovery engine which can populate a Tivoli Change and Configuration Management database. For more information about these two Tivoli components, see the IBM IT Service Management documentation. It is not clear from the documentation how much configuration detail is captured from an AIX OS image by TADDM. TADDM can potentially be used to determine the differences between two AIX images.

The AIX compare_report command can be used to identify differences in filesets levels on two different AIX images.

The AIX Health Check article in the IBM Systems Magazine discusses tools which can be used to document a Power System configuration.

An alternative is the sample snapaix Korn shell script which, when run on an AIX image, produces output displaying the AIX configuration. If the shell script is run on two different AIX images, if the shell script output is directed to a file, and if the diff command is run to compare the two output files, the diff command output will display the differences between the two AIX images.

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