[Sunhelp] OT: RS/6000's

[Nicholas Dronen]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2000 at 08:54:31PM -0800, Paul Khoury wrote:

> On Wed, 8 Nov 2000 20:25:27 -0700, Nicholas Dronen wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, Nov 08, 2000 at 06:24:22PM -0800, Paul Khoury wrote:
> >> I just bought an RS/6000 to learn alongside my SPARCstations,
> >> and since I know there are some people here familiar with AIX,
> >> maybe someone could tell me of any good sites, similiar to Sunhelp?
> >
> >I know of no such thing, sadly.
> >
> >You can always use http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/ for some documentation,
> >especially as you'll probably be amazed how unobious it is to install
> >man pages on AIX.  After you have man pages, you might want to look
> >for a sysadmin guide on http://www.redbooks.ibm.com.  Beware that
> >it's a very unfriendly site to search.  The results rarely make
> >sense.
> 
> IBM's search engine *NEVER* makes sense. =)  That I can expect.  I haven't played
> much with their redbooks, but am familiar with what they are.  Any good books on AIX?
> I've seen some at Barnes and Noble, but forgot the names.

I'm not familiar with any good books on AIX other than some Redbooks.
I learned AIX doing support for IBM.  Before then I had played with
Linux for less than a year.  (That might just strike fear into your
heart. :)

> >Finally, your best bet at advice from real people is comp.unix.aix.
> >A number of veteran AIX folks post there, including people from 
> >AIX development in Austin.  Of course, read the comp.unix.aix
> >FAQ as well.  It'll help prepare you for the shock. :)
> >
> That bad?  I hear some people love AIX, and others curse on it.
> I just want to learn as many flavors of UNIX for work experience, as I'm
> going back to school now, instead of working full time.

The big shock is the ODM.  And, unless you get AIX 5L, you won't
have anything useful resembling truss, except syscalls (in the
perfagent.tools fileset).  It's actually a good operating system,
but you shouldn't expect it to be as UNIX-like as Solaris.  It's
networking stack is based on the BSD code, so that is solid, and
it's wonderful to have native LVM support.  But it's still IBM's
implmentation of UNIX, and IBM doesn't understand UNIX as well
as Sun does.  Also, user administration is better insofar as it
provides account features that you're not likely to find in anything
from Sun except Trusted Solaris.  

Regards,

Nick Dronen