Top 7 Avoidable Risks of IBM Power System sites
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 |
Do you solve expensive problems?
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]
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An (almost) Infallible Sign that Your OS is Going to Self-Destruct
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: aix anthony_english disaster backup os backups system rebuild mksysb recovery restore dr |
"You need to buy a Fibre Channel adapter. No, wait!"
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: virtualisation channel vfc npiv fibre virtual tape |
How to page down in SMITTY
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]
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Cleaning Out Your File System? Don't Be Too Thorough!
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]
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VIOS - switching between padmin and root
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 vios padmin ibm_i virtual_io_server aix oem_setup_env i |
VIOS - switching between padmin and root
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]
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Creating an Online Course? Tell me where it hurts.
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 |
Do you suffer from VIOS phobia?
Most IBM Power Systems these days have a Virtual I/O Server, commonly known as the VIOS. The VIOS facilitates the sharing of physical I/O resources. In other words, you don't need to assign an adapter for disk for each logical partition, and then another adapter for the network traffic. Instead, the VIOS owns the adapters and then you can share the resources (disk and network) by creating virtual adapters. The benefit? This greatly reduces the amount of I/O drawers, cabling and configuration, so it makes it easy for you to... [More]
Tags: power7 i/o vios npiv virtual_ethernet aix virtual server hmc san power8 power_systems ibm ibm_i |
Anthony English is an independent contractor who solves expensive problems for businesses running IBM Power Systems.
He has written extensively about AIX and has been recognised for his contributions and thought leadership by being named an IBM Champion for Power Systems.
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