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

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 aix virtual_ethernet hmc server virtual san power8 power_systems ibm ibm_i

You can create a file using the AIX touch command. The touch command is used to update a file's timestamp, but if the file doesn't exist, then the touch command creates it. That's an easy way of creating a lock file - the sort of file you use to alert the world that they can't log in because some process is running - or a trigger or flag file whose existence is a signal to some script or program to begin the next process.   Trigger Happy   The problem with creating an empty lock/flag/trigger file is that no one knows where it came from. You may... [More]

Tags:  touch lock_file timestamp trigger_file flag_file

There are lots of good reasons for having spare disk for rootvg, as I looked at in the post make way for rootvg . With virtual disks you can resize your volume group on the fly: Increase rootvg dynamically If your rootvg “disk” is actually virtual, such as a SAN LUN or a logical volume on the VIO server, then it usually can be expanded on the SAN (or using   extendlv   on the VIOS) and then recognised on the AIX LPAR using the   -g   flag of the   chvg command : chvg -g rootvg Note: this is supported for rootvg and... [More]

Tags:  disk growth chvg aix resize spare volume_group backend lun 7.1 extendlv 5.3 6.1 rootvg san

As you know, you can display all the file systems using the AIX df command . But what if you want to run df just for the file systems in a single volume group? You may want to identify the culprites filling up a LUN, for example. It's surprisingly simple to do df by vg . It's a matter of combining two commands: lsvgfs and df. Command 1: lsvgfs You can use lsvgfs to list all the file systems belonging to a volume group . # lsvgfs rootvg <!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm... [More]

Tags:  aix lsvgfs volume_group df grep file_systems awk

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 business_risk firmware vios_upgrade dr redundancy

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]

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]