Have you ever encountered this error message on AIX before?   # man -k loopmount man: 0703-310 file man not found. Create the whatis database using the <catman -w> command Of course you have! If you’ve ever installed AIX from scratch then you have undoubtedly seen this message.   And of course, you dutifully executed the ‘ catman –w ’ command to rectify the situation. Didn’t you? But what if   ‘ catman –w ’   doesn’t work as expected?   I recently came across this minor issue. Running catman produced the following error... [More]

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If you are a system administrator that is responsible for managing AIX systems that run SAP, then you’ve probably had an experience similar to the following?   OK, so one day my SAP Basis administrator contacts me and says “ I can’t start saposcol ......can you please reboot the system? ” I quickly reply, “ Was there an error message when trying to restart saposcol ?”. He replies, “ No ”. Again I return very quickly, “ OK, have you checked to see if there are any shared memory segments left for saposcol? ”.   Just as quick, he replies “... [More]

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OK, it’s official. The AIX 7 Open Beta is now available for testing!   An overview of the program is available here:   https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/websphere/aix7ob/index.shtml   Essentially this program is designed to give IBM customers, ISVs and IBM BPs the opportunity to gain early experience with the latest release of AIX prior to general availability. This is a great time to join forces and help IBM mould the next generation of the AIX OS.   I got involved in the AIX 6 Open Beta back in 2007 . It was a... [More]

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I like lsof .   Whenever I’m building a new AIX system I always make sure to install it. I really like the fact that I can quickly list processes that are connected to TCP and UDP ports on my system. For example, to check for the current SSH connections on my system I can run lsof and check port 22 (SSH). Immediately I have a good idea of the existing SSH sessions/connections. I can also check to see if the SSH server (sshd daemon) is running and listening (LISTEN) on my AIX partition.   # lsof -i tcp:22 Value of I :77    np:0 COMMAND... [More]

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I created my first ‘versioned’ AIX 5.2 WPAR on AIX 7 today. To get me started, I followed the steps in the following guide from the AIX 7 Open Beta On-line Information Centre:   http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v7r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cre/creconfig-create-wpar.htm   In order to create the WPAR, I needed an AIX 5.2 mksysb file to supply to the mkwpar command.   Fortunately, I just happened to have an old AIX 5.2 mksysb image in my archives!   I then executed the following command to build the WPAR:   # mkwpar -n wpar1... [More]

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IBM made some announcements today relating to their latest POWER7 server offerings. The new line of systems includes new entry level systems and the highly anticipated high-end system, the POWER7 795 !   They also officially outlined some of the new features available in AIX 7.1. You can review the details here . I’ve discussed some of these new features here and here . The official AIX 7.1 announcement details are available here .   The announcement got me thinking about my recent customer engagements and why some have chosen to deploy... [More]

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I remember reading this interesting document about some challenges renaming AIX devices.   http://gibsonnet.net/aix/ibm/The_Fun_of_Oracle_RAC_ASM_and_Device_Names.doc   This poor guy had to jump through some hoops to rename some disk and network devices in a clustered AIX (Oracle RAC) environment.   This comment stayed with me:   “ The easy way to get network adapters and disk names to match between systems would be to run something like   # chdev –l old_name –n new_name   Except, this command option does NOT exist. ”   Since then I’ve... [More]

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I just had to share this entertaining presentation with everyone.   http://gibsonnet.net/AIX/ibm/Journey_in_VLAN_world.pps   Or the PDF. It's not as interesting or fun, as the animations don't work but you get the idea. I'm sharing the PDF because it appears that you can open this file on Windows fine (in read-only mode) but on a Mac it prompts for a password without an option for opening in read-only. Shame.   https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/cgaix/resource/Journey_in_VLAN_world.pdf   It was... [More]

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Interested in learning more about the next generation of Virtual I/O Server? Yes? Then take a look at this presentation. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/cgaix/resource/VM19.pdf   The following diagram gives you a high-level overview of the classic VIOS compared with the NextGen VIOS. Should be enough to spark your interest! Happy reading!      

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A colleague of mine contacted me during the week to ask how one could determine if a POWER7 system was capable of Active Memory Expansion. I thought I'd share my response with everyone who follows my blog.   You can check if the system is capable of providing Active Memory Expansion (AME), from the HMC command line using the lssyscfg command, as shown here:   hscroot@hmc1:~> lssyscfg -r sys -m Server-8233-E8B-SN1000 -F active_mem_expansion_capable 1 Alternatively you can view the capabilities of the managed system from the HMC GUI,... [More]

Marcações:  ame gibson power7 sap lparstat hmc memory chris amepat expansion active aix lssyscfg

I received an email this week from a colleague that worked with me on the NIM Redbook back in 2006. He was experiencing an issue with DSM and NIM. He was attempting to use the dgetmacs command to obtain the MAC address of the network adapters on an LPAR. The command was failing to return the right information.   This was the output from his attempt with dgetmacs :   # dgetmacs -n lpar1 Using an adapter type of "ent". Could not dsh to node lpar1. Attempting to use openfirmware method to collect MAC addresses. Acquiring adapter... [More]

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Last year I wrote an article on using nimadm to migrate to AIX 6.1 . The procedures outlined how to migrate a live system with nimadm and a spare disk. Another method that I have found to be extremely useful is the migration of mksysb images from one version of AIX to another using (you guessed it) nimadm . In the following example I migrated an AIX 6.1 mksysb image to AIX 7.1 and then used that image to install a new LPAR via NIM. The source LPAR was running AIX 6.1 TL6 SP3. I took a mksysb of this system to my NIM master. # oslevel -s... [More]

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I’ve written about multibos before, here and here . But recently I started experimenting with multibos mksysb migration. A customer asked me how this worked and apart from a high-level view I wasn’t able to provide any real world experience, so I thought I’d give it a try. What follows is just a ‘brain dump’ from my quick test.   First of all this isn’t really a migration. It just simply populates a second instance of AIX with a higher-version. It doesn’t really migrate (or merge) your existing configuration into the second instance. So... [More]

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I received an email from one of my customers recently that simply said:   “mate …on lpar30, for some reason the IBM.DRM and others are failing to start .. um .. any chance you could have a quick look at that ?”   So I asked, “OK, so this use to work right?”. To which I received a relatively confused reply, ” .....yep it did....actually no....it’s never worked....or has it???...I’m not sure... ”.   Based on my experience, the most common issue that prevents DLPAR operations... [More]

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