Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

virtuallyfun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#41

Post by dosman33 »

sillystuff wrote: post #32
kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

I'm surprised at all the positive things being said about AIX in this thread. I thought it was pretty terrible (my priors were SunOS, Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX, Linux, BSD). Personally, I preferred any of the above over AIX. AIX configuration was opaque with a windows registry style setup. All the standard utilities like sed, awk, etc., were versions from 1970. It was incredibly frustrating to use. They did supply some gn…

Sounds like perhaps like most of your experiences were with pre-AIX version 4? No system is perfect for sure. By the time I started using AIX it was with version 4 and was moving to 5 and I can't say any of the problems you've described were things I had encountered with it. Certainly I had lots of problems though.

Not suggesting you didn't experience these things though of course.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#42

Post by random314 »

inkyoto wrote: post #11
kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

It is hard to say about now, for most of the interesting AIX features are tightly coupled to the IBM hardware (e.g. dynamic CPU re-/allocation across LPAR's and a gazillion of other things), and the hardware is rare to come by nowadays. For its time, though, AIX was highly innovative and was perhaps the first UNIX that bundled a LVM and a journaling file system into the standard system distribution (and not as separa…

JFS! You had the option to upgrade to Veritas' VxFS and VxVM.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#43

Post by devstar »

a-dub wrote: post #37
qubex wrote: post #22

Back when I dealt with AIX (1997-2001) it was common to deride it on usenet as “UNIX by and for drunk aliens” but I myself enjoyed its very regular naming conventions and extremely low footprint whilst under intensive memory load, which was common back then when RAM was stratospherically expensive. Excellent NUMA support too.

i remember every error message from every unix tool spitting out some unique identifier code... i presume some ibm documentation standard. i also remember a weird gui for administering everything. i assume that was the result of ibm's big investments.

Perhaps you are remembering the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) GUI? https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/txseries/8.2?topic=SSAL2T_8.2.0/...

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#44

Post by guenthert »

qubex wrote: post #22

Back when I dealt with AIX (1997-2001) it was common to deride it on usenet as “UNIX by and for drunk aliens” but I myself enjoyed its very regular naming conventions and extremely low footprint whilst under intensive memory load, which was common back then when RAM was stratospherically expensive. Excellent NUMA support too.

I think binary configuration files requiring specialized editors weren't all that popular. We had a RS6000 box in the lab, originally acquired to assure compatibility of our enterprise NAS appliance with AIX. Nobody liked that box and as Linux won the Unix wars, we were relieved that we didn't have to deal with it.

(and yes, while Linux was then the (much) preferred choice, we had prior experience with other *nixes)

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#45

Post by yourapostasy »

kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

If you have a pressing business need for near-mainframe security and/or resilience for monoserver applications, and are willing to spend the money for it, its hardware, staffing, and the platinum IBM Support and training, in some cases it is still cheaper than rolling your own under Linux. IBM packages a one-stop shop for a RAS experience [1] that would need a deep bench of engineering talent to reproduce were you to roll your own equivalent in Linux. So some customers would rather pay IBM than try to build such an organization and for them, AIX is worth it.

Generally however with IBM’s rampant offshoring of support leading to a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge and rapid turnover of the offshore support teams, I’ve found unless you’re signing 7-9 figure renewal checks and paying for enhanced support, the support experience is way worse than it was around the 1990’s but still marginally better than other vendors.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/2RJYYJML

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#46

Post by guenthert »

dosman33 wrote: post #40
Maursault wrote: post #5

>IBM who brought it’s [ sic ] AIX This is misleading at best. AIX didn't exist for IBM to purchase. IBM collaborated with Interactive Systems Corporation under contract to develop AIX in 1985 and released AIX Version 1 in 1986. IBM collaborated with Locus Computing Corporation, again under contract, to release Version 2 in 1992. Since the mid-1980's, IBM has poured massive development into AIX, which got so stable an…

Heh, yea I was sorely disappointed when I switched from primarily admining AIX to Linux for work. While I had played with Linux long before I got started with AIX, I had only ever used it on desktop workstations and such. Lots of things like ethernet channel bonding that worked fine out of the box on AIX took endless hours of fiddling to get it to sort of work under Linux.

Hmmh? It's pretty well documented in Documentation/networking/bonding.txt in the Linux kernel source tree I thought. I needed our Linux boxes to do bonding somewhere in the 2011-2012 time frame. I don't recall much of a headache.

(edit: I misremembered the project/time frame)

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#47

Post by tbrownaw »

chasil wrote: post #25
Nursie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean ... I used to write software in C that targeted AIX as well as HPUX, Solaris etc back in the 00s. It was fine. Posix compliant, had a C compiler, debugging was OK with dbx (IIRC you could get ddd to use dbx as its subordinate debugger, which was helpful). The main selling point AFAICT was that it was on POWER, which has always been a pretty competitive set of processors, often faster than x86/64 in some (no do…

Zones all run under the same kernel. I'm guessing these lpars all have separate kernels.

My understanding is

lpar - VM or domU or such

wpar - zone or jail or container or such

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#48

Post by sillystuff »

dosman33 wrote: post #41
sillystuff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised at all the positive things being said about AIX in this thread. I thought it was pretty terrible (my priors were SunOS, Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX, Linux, BSD). Personally, I preferred any of the above over AIX. AIX configuration was opaque with a windows registry style setup. All the standard utilities like sed, awk, etc., were versions from 1970. It was incredibly frustrating to use. They did supply some gn…

Sounds like perhaps like most of your experiences were with pre-AIX version 4? No system is perfect for sure. By the time I started using AIX it was with version 4 and was moving to 5 and I can't say any of the problems you've described were things I had encountered with it. Certainly I had lots of problems though. Not suggesting you didn't experience these things though of course.

I don't recall versions, but the broken journal was whatever version was current in the early mid '00s. The symptom was as if a hard shutdown (on an fs without a journal) even after a clean OS shutdown-- i.e., have to run fsck on every startup (deleting/creating new journal fixed issues; just notable to me since I've never observed similar fs corruption on any other platform).

Early '00s for the malloc issue with things that used autoconf. I first ran into this when attempting to build AIDE + deps on AIX. Creating a wrapper around AIX malloc and linking it in was easier than re-working a bunch of autoconf scripts.

I haven't touched AIX since the late mid-00s. My comparisons were to the state of its contemporaries, at the time.

Yes, nothing is perfect, but AIX was the wartiest, and experience from other NIX transferred the least, of the commercial NIXs that I've used (IMO, Solaris was the nicest of the commercial offerings [pre-Oracle]). But, it looks like AIX was liked/loved by quite a few folks per this comment section-- I wish we'd had some of these folks on staff at the job with AIX boxes, so those of us less enthusiastic about the platform wouldn't have had to deal with it.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#49

Post by mech422 »

devstar wrote: post #43
a-dub wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i remember every error message from every unix tool spitting out some unique identifier code... i presume some ibm documentation standard. i also remember a weird gui for administering everything. i assume that was the result of ibm's big investments.

Perhaps you are remembering the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) GUI? https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/txseries/8.2?topic=SSAL2T_8.2.0/...

I used to get a kick out of how the lil 'running man' in SMIT would fall over if a command failed :-P More sense of humour then I gave IBM credit for :-D

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#50

Post by classichasclass »

Maursault wrote: post #8
macksd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Brought" is the past tense tense of "bring", not "buy". I think you're missing the 'r' when you read that.

missed the r. Aren't I illiterate?

Still a great history though.
Post reply on HN