I've finished my week long IBM AIX training course. A very interesting experience. AIX is so different from anyother UNIX that a course that just covers it's unique attributes is very useful.
Next week it's back to the reality of normal life...
AIX and HPUX are both very different from all other unices, but in similar ways for similar reasons. Both were early attempts at making Unix IT-friendly (e.g., SMITy) which are to some extent captive to the installed base. What I miss most on AIX is POSIX ACEs
Have you found the Unix Command Line Rosetta Stone web page? It's your polyglot Hungarian Phrase Book.
I rather enjoy AIX at $DayJob, but it sure does scare the Solaris refugees.
What are you doing with AIX? Programming, Sysadmin, ? [I'm doing "Architechture", which means I tell the programmers what not to do, and the sysadmins what the programmers' requests really mean
Re:re AIX
ajt on 2006-01-15T12:10:31
I knew that AIX was an early Unix fork. I suppose it's trying to be friendly. SMITty isn't bad for tasks you do infrequently, but for common stuff it does get in the way.
The Unix Rosetta Stone was mentioned on the course - everyone was converting/cross training from another Unix - so that proved most useful. I'd seen it before along time ago but forgotten about it.
We run our SAP ERP system on AIX/Informix with Linux application servers. I'm part of the tiny team that looks after the H/W, Unix and SAP BASIS side of things. I'm quite happy with the Linux on PC side and SAP BASIS isn't too hard, but AIX was a bit weird so that was this winter's training.
Re:re AIX
n1vux on 2006-01-15T16:27:27
I suppose it's trying to be friendly. SMITty isn't bad for tasks you do infrequently, but for common stuff it does get in the way.Most attempts at "friendly" are power-user hostile.
:-/ The "lswhatever" commands are the commandline frequent/scriptable hooks that I use with SSH magic and Perl. The Unix Rosetta Stone was mentioned on the course - everyone was converting/cross training from another Unix - so that proved most useful. I'd seen it before along time ago but forgotten about it.
Recently improved with JavaScript to let you zoom to just the columns you want !
but AIX was a bit weird so that was this winter's training.
AIX (or HPUX) as a monoculture in the datacenter is pretty nice, once you get over the culture shock. Jumping back and forth between Linux, Solaris and AIX is confusing until you get situational reflexes; I'm doing that too. Hopping between Linuxes is much easier.
Enjoy!
Re:re AIX
ajt on 2006-01-16T18:50:44
smitty isn't too bad, at least it only builds commands from the real tools, so you can see what it's about to do. On the whole I agree that a lot of these kind of automated tools do make your life harder as you gain more experience.
I can see that living in an all AIX woruld would be nice. Alas I work in a 99% Windows world. I'm getting a happier at switching between Linux and AIX, now that understand AIX better.
