Do you ever feel you wish you could answer some of your own questions when you work with AIX® and your System p™ server? Do you ever feel you could save time by not having to call on the support professionals all the time? Well, wish no more. Shiv Dutta discusses some of the AIX commands that answer those questions and tells you how to enlarge the list of such answers. Look at the below link for the Answer.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-dutta_cmds.html

Ah why not leave us a comment of what do you think?

Most companies these days restrict their internet access by forcing the usage of web proxy. If your company is forcing a proxy policy & you are running Redhat/CentOs/Fedora you will have to update your yum.conf to be able to update your desktop or server using yum over a proxy connection. Luckily setting up yum to run over a proxy is an easy task. below is the few steps you need to follow to establish just that.

Edit the file /etc/yum.conf and add the following lines:

  # The proxy server - server: port
  proxy=http://proxy.mydomain.com:3128
  # If proxy authentication is required
  proxy_username=yum_user
  proxy_password=yun_user_password 

The next step is to declare the variable http_proxy to run
when the yum rpm get executed to avoid the below error:

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: nokey, key
ID e8562897


To declare the variable http_proxy run:

# export http_proxy='http://proxy.mydomain.com:3128'
This line can be added to the .bashrc so you will not have to run it each time you log on.
Please let us know if this was useful or on the other hand if it did not work for you by leaving us a comment.


					February 16th, 2009 by admin in Cent OS Tips & Tricks,Fedora Tips & Tricks,RHEL Tips & Tricks |   Comments (5)
				

A crazy question huh. I was wondering how many people who will fall on my blog by mistake or even who meant to will know what AIX stand for. So I thought I will give a hint to all of you.

According to wikipedia AIX (A dvanced I nteractive eXecutive) is a proprietary UNIX operating system from IBM. Originally meant “Advanced IBM Unix” but the name probably was not approved by the legal department and was changed to “Advanced Interactive Executive

Its official development owner website is http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/aix/ further more the biggest addon to AIX from other Unix flavors is the SMIT administration tool, which is a text mode interface that easy administration tasks in AIX.

Ah, I hope now you can say it loud with a proud I know what is AIX. Haha please leave a comment on what do you think of it?

A typical AIX system administrator problem is the importance of these systems, and being not able to stop them at anytime & for any reason. A downtime on these AIX boxes are very expensive and the admin has to avoid at all cost. In the other hand, its often the case where the admin has to move the data from one disk to another without losing data. Furthermore, the admin has to avoid downtime while handling the migration. Few typical reasons why the admin need to migrate data between different disks or even storages are:

• The requirment to move to a larger disk
• The requirement to move to a different Raid Configuration disk
• The requirement to move from local disk to the SAN or any other external disk
• The requirement to move to a new VG configuration

The above reasons are just a few reasons why you would need to migrate data between different disks on AIX. As these AIX Servers has to always stay online, below is the method to migrate the data between disks with the least amount of downtime possible, even no downtime in most situations :).

The first thing to ensure is the new disk is hot plug ready, so it does not required a downtime to attach it to the system. Most SAN & disks in the market today are HOT-SWAP ready.  So ensure you get one of these.

OK, the basic idea of this exercise is to avoid stopping the services while moving the data between the old disk /LUN (hdisk1) to the new disk/LUN (hdisk2). This is done by avoiding to stop the service to use LVM. Below is the instruction:

1-  Attach the new disk (hdisk2) and ensure its available to the system
# cfgmgr
# lsdev -Cc disk

2- Add the disk to the volume group where the FS (datasvg)
# /usr/sbin/extendvg datasvg hdisk2

3-  Move logical volumes of disk origin (hdisk1) to the new disk (hdisk2)
# /usr/sbin/migratepv hdisk1 hdisk2

4- Remove the original disk (hdisk1) of
# /usr/sbin/reducevg datasvg hdisk2

5- Finally, we note that the original disc contains nothing new or that the disk contains the file systems
# lspv -l hdisk1
# lspv -l hdisk2

Ah I hope that help you avoid one of these ugly downtime where your boss has to give you a hard time before approving it. Please leave a comment with your success story & experience with the above instruction :).

If you are looking for some IBM AIX / Pseries software, or even if you are looking for any IBM software in general then you must check out ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/

The above ftp server is loaded with legal IBM software than you can use or just learn about them. Check it out & comment which of these tools were usefull for you.

Throughout the life of a volume group (VG) can happen a lot. The most common are in relation to its size or its physical volumes. Ah, I can hear a lot of you thinking about how to expand their volume :).

When changing the size of a physical volume (PV) AIX does not realize it hot. In AIX boxes it is common that the disk is coming from an external storage (Ex: SAN) and some of the LUNs which correspond to devices that exist in hdiskX VG has been expanded. We recalculate the size of available disk with the following:

# Chvg -g

For more info about Chvg check out:  IBM Pseries Chvg.

When you get to the most unfortunate time & you have a failure with your AIX box it get to be handy to have the list of AIX Error Codes and their diagnosis. Although googling & internet searching is invaluable options these days, when searching for a resolution for AIX ensure it is totally related to IBM AIX.  For that the AIX error codes list provided by IBM becomes invaluable in these cases. Below is these codes for AIX running on IBM POWER 5 & IBM POWER 6:

Progress or error codes in AIX (POWER5)
Reference codes for POWER6

Further more, a great set of error codes is the AIX IPL progress codes which explain the errors which get spit at you by the IPL code if the boot progress of you POWER server fail to give you a clue of the problem its facing.

As we are giving tips here for the error codes of IBM POWER, then the below two links to the IBM pSeries Support team is your next stop if the error codes were not part of the error codes list given above:

pSeries Support
AIX / pSeries Fix Central

Were any of the links above helpful for you please let us know, do you have a great AIX/Pseries link let us know about it. Leave us a comment :).

This is a super funny video explaining why BSD is dying. You really should watch this for a good laugh :). Though Please don’t get us wrong we love BSD, but can’t persist this funny video.