It must be the techie in me, but I don’t like to make arrangements to meet someone without having a backup plan. What if they don’t make it on time? What if I don’t? I know what you’re thinking: call their mobile. But do I have their mobile number handy? Will we have coverage? Will […]
AIX tech tip: a tribute to AIX devices
When you have a device connected to AIX, such as a disk or a tape drive, you can discover it using cfgmgr. As you’d expect, it will have the default parameters that are used for the device driver. Sometimes you’ll want to change these parameters – usually to allow you to tune the device for […]
AIX tech tip: How to scan new devices with a single command
There are things I really love about virtualisation for Power Systems. I probably appreciate some things more than other people do because I got to see how things used to work many years ago. A combination of physical and virtual enhancements has made life a lot easier than it used to be. I remember when […]
AIX tech tip: which HMC does this LPAR belong to?
In a large Power environment where you have multiple Power Systems and perhaps hundreds of LPARs, there may well be multiple Hardware Management Consoles. When the environment is spread across several sites, it can be a challenge even identifying which HMC to log onto to manage a particular LPAR. I recently had this situation. I […]
Time-saving tips for AIX device configuration
When you have a one-off command to run on AIX, you just type it in. If you have to do it hundreds of times, you are better off if you script it. But what if the scripting still isn’t fast enough? I recently had to remove hundreds of virtual SCSI (vSCSI) devices from a Virtual […]
A message from our new AIX expert, Anthony English
When I saw that PowerWire had hit the virtual newsstands, I naturally wondered whether it was short on material about AIX. As it turns out, the editor was more than happy to add some antipodean Unix articles to the mix. As an AIX techie from way back (I worked on the first commercial release, AIX […]
AIX tech tip: make friends with the VIOS command syntax
If you are familiar with running commands on AIX, you may have logged onto the Virtual I/O Server and found the syntax frustrating. For example, the following command on AIX will list disks: lsdev –Cc disk But when you’re logged into the restricted shell on the VIOS (usually as the user ‘padmin’), that will give […]