[geeks] Carly's Gone!!! (now AIX)

[Kevin]

Sounds pretty cool.  I've never touched an AIX box, but in light
of this it is more "interesting" to me now.  One day i'll have to
look into getting a POWER box.

Thanks for the info,
/KRM

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 15:14:59 -0600 (CST)
"Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Kevin wrote:
> 
> > What's "Not Unix" about it?  Not contesting the statement,
> > just curious.
> 
> It's Not Unix.  The system calls are nothing like Unix; in
> fact, a lot of what would be system calls on most Unixes are
> implemented in libc in AIX and are wrappers around the AIX
> syscalls.  Resource management(internally, especially virtual
> memory and I/O space) isn't very Unixy. System administration
> (espeically with regards to the ODM) is way different.
> 
> AIX will run applications written for Unix.  There's plenty of
> compatibility there for it to act just like Unix.  In fact,
> that's why IBM sells it as a Unix.  But, if you really want to,
> you can write to the lower levels of the API and have something
> totally nonportable and take advantage of LPAR and the ODM and
> all the other system facilities that come with AIX.
> 
> You can also use AIX just like Unix.  If you try to admin AIX
> just like Unix, though, you're not getting the full power of
> the OS.  There are neat little tools to abstract that away. 
> There's smit for system administration.  There are command-line
> tools that hide the ODM (mkuser, rmuser, chuser, mkfs, mkvg,
> mklv, mkgroup, etc.), but you can also get at the ODM directly.
>  For example, I can get a list of my system swap
> spaces like this:
> 
>    $ odmget -q "attribute=type AND value=paging" CuAt
> 
>    CuAt:
>            name = "hd6"
>            attribute = "type"
>            value = "paging"
>            type = "R"
>            generic = "DU"
>            rep = "s"
>            nls_index = 639
> 
> And then ask for the description of the device associated with
> each of that paging space like this:
> 
>    $ odmget -q "name=hd6" CuDv
> 
>    CuDv:
>            name = "hd6"
>            status = 0
>            chgstatus = 1
>            ddins = ""
>            location = ""
>            parent = "rootvg"
>            connwhere = ""
>            PdDvLn = "logical_volume/lvsubclass/lvtype"
> 
> How many other OSes let you run database queries against the
> active and stored configurations? :)
> 
> That query system is exposed through the API, too.  odmget is a
> -very- small program that just passes its parameters to a
> couple of AIX library routines.  Those library routines
> understand the query language so you don't even have to write a
> parser.
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Patschke   )   "Let me hear you make decisions
> Elgin, TX          (     without your television."
> USA                 )        --Depeche Mode, "Stripped"
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