on AIX

posted in tech by jon on 2005-04-18

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've changed jobs. Part of the change involves moving from working mostly with linux servers to AIX. A few quick observations/complaints._The Bad_1.) IBM doesn't hesitate to reinvent the wheel. At every turn, you find yourself forced to do things the "AIX way" rather than the unix way. This makes anything you learn NON-TRANSFERABLE. This is one of my biggest pet peeves lately: there are only so many hours in the day, and so many things that i can learn; it's an enormous waste of time and effort to learn things I can't use anywhere else. 2.) The ODM. Come on IBM; this is nothing but the windows registry in disguise. It's a silly, silly, siily idea to store your configuration info in a some arbitrary database format that's easy to corrupt and leave your system unbootable. Having to reinstall your OS because you mistyped a query info a odmdelete command is stupid; and it ain't unix3.) LPAR. This isn't actually BAD, so much as is is SAD. They are actually bragging about finally being able to "split" a single cpu to run multiple hosts. Please. VMWare is light years ahead of Hypervisor in so many ways.4.) Licensing. This is another one that's just sad. My instructor actually bragged about the fact that you didn't have to pay liscensing costs for hot-spare CPUs. Minutes later, he brags about the fact that AIX can now run linux binaries. Hmm.....if linux is free, and has software that I want to run..., why wouldn't I just run linux?5.) Boot times. On the test box I worked on today, it took at least 4 complete minutes to boot AIX. 4 minutes. Too slow. Especially since the kernel is stored in NVRAM.6.) ksh. ksh sucks. Hard. Anybody NOT find tab completion helpful? Any reason up-arrow shouldn't access the command history? Sure, i can make it better with .kshrc entries, but I shouldn't have too. Both "vi mode" and "emacs mode" blow, neither is intuitive. Sensible defaults go a long way, and ksh is sorely lacking in this dept. Some of it I'll chalk up to muscle memory: bash is what I learned after all, but I just can't seem to like ksh, no matter how much I try._The Good_1.) LVM. LVM is awesome, and AIX's is the original implementation. LVM on AIX is seamless and integrated tightly into the OS, the way it should be on linux.2.) Good backup/restore tools. Good solid, reliable tools for backup and restore make for easy sleep.3.) 64bit kernel.

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