[rescue] IBM RS/6000 3CT

Kevin Loch kloch at gurunet.net
Sat Oct 26 00:32:04 CDT 2002


Eric Webb wrote:
> On Saturday 26 October 2002 12:39 am, vance at neurotica.com wrote:
> 
>>>My problem with AIX is from about five years ago where I adminned a few
>>>for a project at school.  Back then, it really seemed like I couldn't
>>>make any configuration changes without using smit(ty), which really got
>>>on my nerves.  I'm willing to take another swing, though.  Wonder how
>>>recent the OS install is.  Need to get that console up!
>>
>>You don't have to use smit.  Smit is just a front end to all the
>>configuration commandline utils.
> 
> 
> I'm surprised to hear you say this...  doing things manually is certainly 
> doable, but changing things without informing the ODM is typically a bad 
> thing with AIX.  Never piss off the ODM gods.
> 

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.  I'm a command-line
bigot but I still use smitty on AIX.

Then there's the logical volume system.  It's a nice system but I
wish there was a "use all remaining available space" option when 
specifying filesystem size.

AIX: "I see you want to create a filesystem.  How large
would you like it to be?"
Admin: "Thank you, Since I've all filesystems but one, I would like
to have (/home | /data | /pr0n) be as large as possible."
AIX: "Sorry, I don't understand.  Exactly how large should it be?"
Admin: "Ok dammnit, don't make me get out the calculator, go back
and look up the number of pp's, the bytes per pp, distance to the moon
and bandwidth capacity of a Geo Metro full of DLT's just to figure out
*approximately* how big I can make it."
AIX: "Tell you what -- why don't you just make it some arbitrary and
reasonable size for now.  You can always expand it later!"
Admin:  "I don't want to create some arbitrarally sized filesystem,
I don't want to get close to allocating all remaining space, I just
want a filesystem that uses *exactly* all remaining space, like I can
in every other operating system."
AIX: "Why would you want to do that?  You should never worry about the
actual physical disks.  You should think in terms of your filesystem 
requirements and I will tell you if you need to add disks.
Admin: "My requirement is N where N=all remaining space.  Can you
help me allocate N bytes?"
AIX: "Sure, just tell me how large N is and make sure you don't
exceed the available space or I'll spit out an ambiguous error
message."
Admin: {switch to O-F-F mode}

KL


KL



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