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:  aix anthony_english disaster backup os backups system rebuild mksysb recovery 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 vios padmin 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

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 hmc virtual server san power8 power_systems ibm ibm_i

If you're a technical person, chances are you're very comfortable talking tech, but not so strong on the self-marketing side of things. Not always true but maybe you could do with some ideas on how to promote yourself and what you do.   This is my first blog entry for 18 months and I cover one simple strategy you can use to help others understand the value you bring. As an example of this, I mention this blog. Although I haven't updated it for a year and a half, I still get work from it, including writing regular paid articles... [More]

Tags:  yourself job hunting to how aix self-promotion sell

"Nothing has changed, but suddenly a service has stopped working." My colleague assured me that no changes had been made on AIX. I had good reason to believe him, as he was a cautious, experienced sys admin, and was in the middle of a change freeze anyway in the leadup to Christmas. In Australia, it is common for companies to have skeleton staff and many people taking their summer holidays, so many companies keep any configuration changes to a minimum. For retail businesses which may have increased sales around the end of December,... [More]

We geeks are special people, aren't we? While the rest of the world is occupied with big issues, we're fascinated with dates. Or at least with date and time patterns. In Australia, the UK, Canada, New Zealand and many other countries, we put the date in the format of dd/mm/yy. In other words, 11/12 means 11 December, not 12 November. So today, Wednesday 11 December 2013, we have these fantastic date and time combinations: 08:09:10 11/12/13 And then, exactly 3 hours 3 minutes and 3 seconds later: 11:12:13 11/12/13 Another 3:03:03 after... [More]

Tags:  date numbers magic

We’ve all met them: gurus who are technically brilliant, and who don’t suffer fools gladly. They are technological dragon-slayers with the ability to untangle any problem, and leave everyone else feeling a mixture of admiration, embarrassment ("why didn't I think of that?") and perhaps even a little resentment. Well, here’s some news for the gurus and the heroes: leave your superhero suit in the wardrobe. Customers don’t want heroes.   Humility Sure, it’s always good to have someone who can... [More]

After upgrading from AIX 5.2 to 6.1, a customer tried to run the lsof command  (that's the command to list open files on the system) and came across this error: The lsof was compiled for AIX 5.2. The customer tried to run this lsof command from an application GUI. The solution's obvious, right? Upgrade the lsof command to the version for AIX 6.1. You'll find the links to do that in the article at the end of the page. However, that lsof upgrade already had been done, and when I logged in via the command line as a different... [More]

Tags:  path environmental alias aix script variables .profile command cli schell env /etc/profile

My compatriot Chris Gibson highlighted a great performance tuning attribute for Fibre Channel adapters in this blog post . I was so excited that I dusted off my blog-writing skills (much neglected) and got fired up enough to put Chris' advice into practice via a script. First, the advice - which came originally from IBM's Dan Braden - is to display the number of command elements - num_cmd_elems - on a Fibre Channel adapter. num_cmd_elems? Huh? On AIX (and on the Virtual I/O Server) there is an attribute on Fibre Channel... [More]

Tags:  fc dan chris gibson fibre aix chdev channel queue adapter num_cmd_elems technote performance depth disk braden

As a freelance contractor, I get to hear about quite a few IBM Power System environments. Some have been built by application vendors who have never opted for a Hardware Management Console (HMC). Many have spent a fair amount of money on dedicated Fibre Channel and Ethernet adapters when they could easily have consolidated the I/O into one or two Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS). There are a lot of mainly smaller systems that are terribly old and out of support, and the business is unaware of the risk. One suggestion I always make is to consider... [More]

In a perfect world, form feeds would be invisible. We'd just print and a new page would spit out just at the right time.  Alas, I've come across someone who thought it a great idea to hard-code a form feed at the beginning of each print job. My initial challenge was to get rid of it. Why? Because a form feed at the start of a print file means a blank page before the real print job.   If you edit the file that gets sent to the printer, using the trusty vi editor, you see something like this:   ^L This is the first line of page one.  And lots... [More]

You know when you go to the ATM or enter a PIN, you're told to cover up your hands so no one can look on. I wonder whether the same rule ought to apply for people on the bus who are on the phone. I've overheard passwords for what seem to be very important institutions, and I have enough non-AIX knowledge to know the root password (for Linux) or Administrator (Windows) is probably something precious.   For that matter, if IBM developerWorks - let's shorten it to ibmdw, had a root password that went something like 1bmdw123 , I'd be a little... [More]

Tags:  security password