AIX for dummies

ronjo

I am an accountant who fell into IT and have been more in consulting role and team leader for last few years.
Now my job is changing and I will have to learn AIX and UNIX and I really have absolutely zero idea about any of it.
I am in a non english speaking country and training wont be so easy and will be on job mainly and maybe some on line courses.

I dont really know what I am looking for but has anyone any advise what is the best way to start of learning basics??

Thanks

Giuseppe90

The following might be useful for you. AIX can be difficult to get familiar with as its not (as far as I could find) possible to run it as a virtual machine on Virtualbox or VMWare Player etc.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/

ronjo

Thanks a lot Giuseppe.

I have also found this which seems quite useful to get basic introduction

http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/

Khannie

AIX is different from other "unixes" or unix like operating systems (like Linux) AFAIK. A generic unix tutorial is likely to be of only limited value on AIX as I understand it. I've never used AIX, so I'm relying on someone telling me that it was horrific to use / I may be talking rubbish.

If AIX is similar to solaris or linux then you could get some practice in with a virtual machine by using virtualbox or vmware or similar.

schrodinger

Khannie wrote: »

AIX is different from other "unixes" or unix like operating systems (like Linux) AFAIK. A generic unix tutorial is likely to be of only limited value on AIX as I understand it. I've never used AIX, so I'm relying on someone telling me that it was horrific to use / I may be talking rubbish.

If AIX is similar to solaris or linux then you could get some practice in with a virtual machine by using virtualbox or vmware or similar.

Handy reference:

http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

Your best bet for a virtual machine setup might be the AIX PowerPC or PS/2 releases. Or perhaps IBM PowerVM on the host.

ronjo

Thanks guys for the replies.

That last link SCHRODINGER may well have been in Chinese for all it means to me
I will see how the training goes whenever it will be organised and take it from there.

Ant

If you can get a books delivered, I'd recommend Essential System Administration by Æleen Frisch. I recently read the 2nd edition which came aeons ago (the mid 90s) but still found it to be a very good book to read (a more recent edition was published in the early 2000s).

The book explains the general concepts and basics of Unix and Unix-like operating systems. After explaining the general concepts, she outlines the different ways each OS implements the important system features (e.g. the name by which an Ethernet connection or disk partition/slice is known) and the differences between the commands used to perform sysadmin tasks in each OS.

She writes in a very readable style and also covers some of the practical and human relationship aspects of being a sysadmin dealing with users.

Tom Dunne

This book is a pretty comprehensive Unix System Administrator's guide, plus it has details on AIX commands. Might help bridge the gap between Linux and AIX.

mathepac

ronjo wrote: »

...
That last link SCHRODINGER may well have been in Chinese for all it means to me ....

It's actually a very useful reference or more correctly cross reference.

Column 1 contains a task you might need to do in UNIX as sysadmin etc.

The other columns are the various flavours of UNIX released from various sources (IBM, Apple, Data General, NCR, Silicon Graphics, Digital (noe Tru64) , Sun, Cray, etc) and the cells give the actual OS commands to be used to achieve the task in column 1 in each "UNIX".

The coloured buttons at the top take you to other aspects of the OSes.

A very useful and comprehensive cross-reference IMHO, but you need to know a bit of UNIX before you understand its usefulness.

Keep it handy, it could save you some grief later in your UNIX career. "UNIX for Dummies" isn't a bad place to start. Install some UNIX / POSIX OS on a low-end PC and play around to your heart's content.

syklops

Matter of interest, where are you moving to that they use AIX?

mathepac

mathepac wrote: »

It's actually a very useful reference or more correctly cross reference. ....

The eagle-eyed amongst will have noticed the glaring omission in my post above.

Treating the table as a searchable document, if you know a command in a proprietary "UNIX", you can use the cross-reference as a "reverse telephone directory" to find the equivalent in generic UNIX or any other published flavour.

Must watch out for senior moments, must watch out for senior moments ...

robodonkey

Howdy, AIX admin here. Used to do some training for IBM back in the day too.

AIX is actually IBMs attempt at a combination of BSD/SystemV, incoprorating the best of both. And then of course they added their own bits and pieces.

You won't be virtualising AIX on any VM/Virtualbox hypervisors though, you'd need Power4 or greater HW (IBM RISC chip) to use IBMs APV or VIOS (their own virtualisation technologies).

As an admin, the tty helper tool "smitty" or "smit" is going to be your friend.
It's a menu driven sys admin tool. Keep an eye on the "f6" whenever you setup a command, it will show you the command line that's being run.

IBMs Redbooks are free pdf downloads, get the Sys Admin and Virtualisation basics ones for reference.

Someone has mentioned the Rosetta Stone, a great easy reference for translating your familiar linux -> an unfamiliar version.

"Linux comaptibility" introduced at AIX 5L, so you can usually find open source SW that will compile easily under AIX, and there's loads of good stuff on www.bullfreeware.com already compiled for you.

Big Vendors did large technology shares back in the late nineties, and you will see HP-UX and Solaris sharing a load of things, like LVM for instance.

I would think any Linux aware admin, or any other flavour of unix for that matter would have no difficulty acclimatising to AIX in a few days.

Complex large estate installations, Highly Available clusters and centralised management functions are all available too, check out NIM, SUMA, multibos, CSM, HACMP.

Any questions feel free to PM me, I have a shedload of docs that may help you.

robodonkey

Just thinking about your requirements here, you could probably get a dirt cheap rs6000 (the "old" hardware) that will get you up and running at AIX5.X
on EBay for a song.....

And finally, another good website for aix:
http://rootvg.net/

And for interest:
http://www.computerworld.com/common/images/site/features/2009/062009/unix_chart_775.jpg

pseudofax

robodonkey wrote: »

"Linux comaptibility" introduced at AIX 5L, so you can usually find open source SW that will compile easily under AIX, and there's loads of good stuff on www.bullfreeware.com already compiled for you..

Why on earth would somebody running AIX require Linux binary compatability? Linux does not have a stable ABI, so this layer does not seem like a good idea. Surely it would be better to just recompile the application for AIX, no?

robodonkey

Do your development on cheap linux and deploy to expensive production environment
with minimum fuss.

pseudofax

robodonkey wrote: »

Do your development on cheap linux and deploy to expensive production environment
with minimum fuss.

If you have to rewrite your codebase to "port" to AIX, the problems are running deeper than you would imagine. Properly written POSIX code should in theory be pretty easy to recompile and port between each varient. Just seems like a complete hack to me tbh.

robodonkey

I agree, its probably more of a salesman's thing than a real world bonus (good code will compile easily anywhere).

AIX5L is named after it's Linux "affinity" and I imagine it was a strategic move by IBM to align itself with Linux (which back in 2001 was accelerating and becoming mainstream).

AIX ships with a seperate CD with the "Linux Applications" on it, things like KDE etc so you can install these tools without having to compile for AIX:
Linux Toolbox

Here's a good porting guide:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246033.html

Also a good time to point out that the IBM pSeries can run Linux Natively (if you wanted to install on your pricey new pSeries box, you could).
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/pt-install-info-ppc.html