January 17, 2012, in category General Maintenance comments No comments

Workload Partitions are a form of compacting down your environment into something more manageable and faster/easier to deploy or destroy.  The idea of a WPAR is that you can run the work of multiple LPARs within a single LPAR.  By creating an LPAR with WPAR capabilities, you can fill it with images running multiple instances of AIX workloads.

By consolidating your LPAR environment, you can create more easily manageable servers for environments with multiple development, sandbox and testing deployments.  Often times with the increase in virtualization, we treat LPARs as though they are disposable machines (which technically they are).  By creating a WPAR, you increase the ease of set up, tie up less physical resources, and keep your environment breadth steady...

January 9, 2012, in category General Maintenance, Miscellaneous, Storage comments No comments

If you’re one of the unlucky ones and find yourself unable to run a Linux workstation at work, and you administer AIX or any UNIX/Linux boxes, I’m sure you have had issues transferring files back and forth.
You can always use ftp and the plethora of programs that handle that connection, but myself I prefer Win SCP.

Win SCP is by far the best file transfer program I have found to bounce files back and forth from my workstation to my lpars.

Simply open the program, enter in your login information, and you can browse between the local and remote folders.  Browse to the source and destination, click and drag… everything is easy peasy and super quick

If you have any input on the matter I’d be happy to hear it!

January 9, 2012, in category AIX Commands, General Maintenance, Scripts comments No comments

Often times you may want to create a script to copy, move or grab files from your AIX machine to a Windows (or other) box.  In some cases, there may a shared Windows drive created office wide and you would like to dump system information or reporting here.  If ssh is not supported on the other end, you will need to use FTP.

General FTP Commands

Here is a quick script to move files from your AIX box to your Windows share.

ftpmove(){

ftp -n <<-EOF
open fully_qualified_server_name
user username password
cd path/to/file
put file_to_copy_to_windows

get file_to_copy_to_aix

EOF
}

ftpmove

January 4, 2012, in category General Maintenance comments No comments

This is a brief explanation on how to utilize the command interface of the HMC in order to view and/or document all of the detailed information regarding your environment.  From the HMC you can use commands such as lssyscfg to find all necessary information concerning your lpars, each managed system or even the entire frame.

Once your virtualized environment reaches numbers about 20 or 30 you might run into troubles organizing where all of your resources have gone.  The HMC web interface does a great job out outlining the processing units, memory, environment and profile information, however you may run into scenarios where you don’t want to give all of the users access to the HMC, or you don’t want to bog down your HMC just for fact finding...

December 15, 2011, in category General Maintenance comments No comments

If you are anything like me you much prefer spending 15 minutes writing a script and letting it do all of the work rather than spending the two gruelling days pounding your face across the keyboard doing the same keystrokes and mouse click over and over.  Well if you aren’t willing to set up all of the SSH private keys in order to have passwordless access to all lpars in your environment, I have a much simpler solution to all of your problems.

From ...

December 12, 2011, in category General Maintenance comments No comments

The crontab file gives you the ability to run batch jobs or commands at a schedules interval as whatever user you would like. Cron will let you maintain automation and consistency in your reporting, documentation and/or outcome of your batch programs. Often times you don’t want to slow down your server during business hours and cron gives you the ability to schedule any job to run after hours. Also, some programs such as reporting tools need to run in increments throughout the day. Whether you are looking to run a mksysb once a week, a local backup every night, or an nmon refresh every 15 minutes, a few minutes of training with the cron will save you a lifetime of work.

To view the cron file
crontab -l
To edit the cron file
crontab -e

Cron works like this:

minute hour day-of-month month da...