TALKING POINT FOR DECISION MAKERS. Business hates risk. Everyone does. That's why we buy insurance, or faster, better, more reliable computers. It's also why we avoid spending. It's all about risk and how we manage it. Now, if a business is running IBM Power Systems, there's a chance they've made a significant investment in getting that hardware in place. So why is it that so many businesses expose themselves to some  very basic risks ? Risks which are avoidable, and which - on the whole - don't require a huge... [More]

Tags:  aix_down_level vios_upgrade firmware business_risk redundancy dr

It's a great question, isn't it? If you're a full-time employee, or maybe a long-term contractor, then you may not have to worry too much about the expenses side of things. Typically, IBM Power Systems are in larger environments for businesses that have a sense of the value of robust equipment. That means bigger teams and - more often than not - that puts you (the techie) at arms-length from the money people. But let me give you a hint: the more the people who control the purse strings value what you do, the better your job... [More]

Alright. I admit it. I've been studying up how to improve my blog post titles. So let me give some disclaimers: (a) your OS is probably not about to self-destruct (but would you be ready for it if it did?) (b) this is only to do with AIX (c) you probably care about your career, so you're going to read on  just in case (d) I've written blog posts and articles about this before (but I'm hoping you don't remember them). Here are four blog posts about the mksysb and how it can save your life:... [More]

Tags:  anthony_english aix backup disaster os system backups rebuild recovery mksysb restore dr

Why is it that every time I start to write a blog post, I think of a title like: "I'm such an idiot." Well, if you're going to make a claim - like the claim that I should be the original face palm statue - I need to provide some evidence. Call it social proof.   Here it comes.   I was working on a site for a client with a small Power 8 system. Two VIOS, a handful of LPARs (sorry, I meant to say VMs) and they wanted to connect a fibre channel tape drive. Redundancy wasn't a big concern for them, so I decided to... [More]

Tags:  channel virtualisation npiv vfc fibre virtual tape

Sometimes the simplest tips can be the best. If you use SMIT (or more likely, the text-based version using the command smitty), you've probably had to scroll down a list of information that may be thousands of lines. If you didn't know better, you'd either be scrolling down a line at a time or - at best - doing a find for a particular word using the forward slash.   There's an easier way and this may just save you and your down arrow key thousands of keystrokes over the next year. (Ahh, the glories of working in the IT... [More]

So, someone asked you to clean up a file system on your AIX logical partition. And you did. Now when you cd to the mount point, there's nothing in it. Zilch. Zip. Nada. Not even that mysterious lost+found directory. THIS IS BAD But don't worry. Help is on the way.   What's the deal with lost+found?   Someone once decided that it would be a great idea to have an AIX directory with a plus sign in its name. So every journaled file system (and enhanced journaled file system - also known as "JFS2") should have a... [More]

One of the benefits of the Virtual I/O server is the predictability of its commands. Commands to list something start with  ls  and device names are prefixed with the pretty guessable  -dev   In fact, I once wrote an article in praise of the VIOS command line interface (CLI).   But [language warning] boy, oh boy, do I find it confusing remembering whether I'm using the restricted shell (logged in as the user  padmin ) or switching to the full-blooded, no decaf, root access.... [More]

Tags:  ibm padmin vios ibm_i virtual_io_server aix oem_setup_env i

One of the benefits of the Virtual I/O server is the predictability of its commands. Commands to list something start with  ls  and device names are prefixed with the pretty guessable  -dev   In fact, I once wrote an article in praise of the VIOS command line interface (CLI).   But [language warning] boy, oh boy, do I find it confusing remembering whether I'm using the restricted shell (logged in as the user  padmin ) or switching to the full-blooded, no decaf, root access.... [More]

The growth in online courses is truly amazing. You can learn pretty much anything. I think that people with extensive IT experience in an enterprise environment are perfectly situated to create courses, provided they avoid some of the beginners' pitfalls (all of them mistakes which I have made). These tips are aimed at the very many IT people who are able to offer online training through a series of emails, short videos or podcasts. But the following tips (mainly the result of the lessons I've needed to learn) aren't just for online... [More]

Tags:  content_creation online_course blogging pain_point blog content_marketing