Whilst working with one of my AIX customers recently I discovered a problem with NIMSH and SSL. The customer had updated their NIM master from AIX 7.1 TL4 SP1 to AIX 7.1 TL4 SP3 . After the SP update, any attempt to connect to a NIM client (over NIMSH+SSL), from the NIM master, would simply hang. For example, we tried to list the filesets on the NIM client with this command, which never returned any output.   [root@750lpar4]/ # nim -o lslpp 750lpar9   The /var/adm/ras/nimsh.log file, on the NIM client, showed that the NIMSH session... [More]

Tags:  nimsh nim sp3 hang lslpp chris ssl 7.1 aix 7100-04-03-1642 tl4 gibson iv93152 -o libssl.so

Recently I've come across an odd issue at two different customers. I thought I'd share the experience, in case others also come across this strange behaviour.   In both cases they reported j2pg high CPU usage .   Similar to this...   And, in both cases, we discovered many /usr/sbin/update processes running. Unexpectedly .   When we stopped these processes, j2pg's CPU consumption dropped to nominal levels.   The j2pg process is responsible for, among other things, flushing data to disk and is called by the... [More]

Tags:  /usr/sbin/update gibson cpu j2pg high aix chris

AIX 7.2 requires 2GB of memory to boot, but this minimum is not enforced in the LPAR profile except by Live Update (to ensure we'll be able to boot the surrogate LPAR). You can check your Minimum Memory setting in your LPARs profile by running the lparstat command (as shown below).   # lparstat -i | grep Memory Online Memory                              : 4096 MB Maximum Memory                        ... [More]

Tags:  gibson minimum aix partition for live memory chris profile 7.2 updates

Enabling TCP large send offload (LSO), on AIX, is generally considered a good thing. It helps with overall network performance.   Taking advantage of networking large-send large-receive https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/W51a7ffcf4dfd_4b40_9d82_446ebc23c550/page/Taking%20advantage%20of%20networking%20large-send%20large-receive   TCP large send offload “This option improves the performance on 10 Gigabit Ethernet and faster adapters for workloads that manage data streaming (such as file transfer... [More]

Tags:  netstat gibson aix chris lso offload send packets large

You can use the HMC lssvcevents command to view DLPAR event history. In the following example, I’m looking for “Add processor” related DLPAR events, over the last 30 days, for a specific LPAR.   $ lssvcevents -t console -d 30 | egrep 'Add processor|DLPAR' | grep s82861p22_nim   time=12/01/2016 00:48:33,text=HSCE2209 User name hscroot: DLPAR Add processor resources to partition s82861p22_nim succeeded on managed system Server-8286-42A-SN214F55V   Search for all DLPAR events over the last 30 days.   $... [More]

Tags:  gibson aix lssvcevents dlpar hmc history events chris

Here’s some handy tips and tricks for managing WPARs in your AIX environment.   How to share a global file system with a WPAR.   - In the Global.   root@750lpar11]/ # uname -W 0   - Global File System that you want to share with the WPAR (750wpar2).   [root@750lpar11]/ # df -g /cg Filesystem    GB blocks      Free %Used    Iused %Iused Mounted on /dev/cglv          1.98      0.30  ... [More]

Tags:  chris tricks namefs gibson partition tips rootvg vwpar woroload wpar migrate aix versioned

When troubleshooting Fibre Channel adapter issues on AIX (or VIOS), I often use the fcstat command to assist me in the process. The command may display error numbers similar to the following:   $ fcstat fcs0   Error opening device: /dev/fscsi0 errno: 00000045   The error number (errno) displayed can (in some cases) be used to identify the root cause of a problem. In the example above, the error number is 45 . This number is in hex. If we convert this to decimal, the number is 69. Now, if we look for 69 in the /usr/include/errno.h... [More]

Tags:  fcstat errno gibson chris vios aix

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the new AIX Live Update feature , available with the AIX 7.2. I discussed how to use this new feature to install an interim fix (ifix) on a running AIX system without a reboot.  On October 11th, 2016, IBM announced the next exciting step in AIX Live Updates .   Introducing IBM AIX 7.2.1 Live Update http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-liveupdate-trs/index.html?ca=drs-&ce=ism0070&ct=is&cmp=ibmsocial&cm=h&cr=crossbrand&ccy=us   This is a... [More]

There may be better ways to do this, and if there are, please let me know. But lately I've been "hacking around" with cloud-init on AIX and trying to make it behave the way I want it to. There were two problems I faced and solved.   My first challenge. The AIX /etc/hosts file isn't updated with the IP address and hostname of the new AIX VM after deployment from PowerVC. To work-around this niggle*, I added the following short but effective shell script to the Activation Input in the PowerVC GUI.    #!/bin/ksh... [More]

Tags:  /etc/hosts update hack resolv.conf chris cloud-init aix gibson hostname