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

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

#51

Post by classichasclass »

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.

As an AIX admin since 3.2.5 and someone who personally owns AIX hardware, when it comes to device support in AIX it either works perfectly or not at all.

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

#52

Post by classichasclass »

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.

Correct, LPARs are akin to hardware partitions. Even my single-instance personal box has an LPAR and doesn't run on the metal (it just gets everything that's installed).

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

#53

Post by classichasclass »

chasil wrote: post #24
Spooky23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoyed it, although Solaris was easier as the user base was bigger. My usage was circa 2000-2005. I loved smit and smitty, and would start new interns and juniors on AIX because the command lines to perform tasks would be generated and allow them to become productive quickly.

An AIX admin told me in the late 90s that there were no kernel tunables (i.e. sysctl.conf). That would be very nice. The jfs journaling filesystem was much better than ufs until sun got zfs into the formal distribution

There's no sysctl, but there are definitely tunables and there's a whole subculture of jackbooted thug AIX admins who spend all day messing with them for peak performance. I'm not one of them, but I remember tweaking the network stack a bit on my 4.1 system back in the day.

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

#54

Post by pram »

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.

IBM sells (sold?) a thing called the HMC that manages multiple AIX machines, and their LPAR/WPARs. It was a web interface, maybe that is what you remember?

It had a dedicated 1U server you had to buy too lol, what a grift

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

#55

Post by classichasclass »

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/...

Smit happens(tm)

Though I always preferred it from the command line (appropriately, the binary is named smitty: see, IBM does have a sense of humour).

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

#56

Post by pram »

mech422 wrote: post #49
devstar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IBM GUIs were always pretty interesting. The cursor in early ThinkPad BIOS was a bird that flapped its wings.

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

#57

Post by classichasclass »

trasz wrote: post #36
hapless wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RS/6000 was the fourth AIX platform after x86 (AIX 1.x), IBM RT/ROMP (AIX 2.x), and the mainframe (AIX/370, AIX/390)

How related to one another were those though? I remember AIX being expanded to “Any IBM UNIX”.

Not particularly. Any influence or overlap between them was in a strictly general sense. There are front end similarities but the internals are rather different, as would be expected for a rapidly evolving OS with lots of different authors. AIX didn't start to gel until around the 3.x or 4.x days.

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

#58

Post by classichasclass »

pram wrote: post #54
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.

IBM sells (sold?) a thing called the HMC that manages multiple AIX machines, and their LPAR/WPARs. It was a web interface, maybe that is what you remember? It had a dedicated 1U server you had to buy too lol, what a grift

Yeah, that's what started turning me off modern systems. None of my earlier hardware required it, but my POWER6 did. You can do some things in ASMI but if you want to reconfigure an LPAR or (horrors) add one, then you're digging out the HMC. It was just an off the shelf IBM x86 system running Linux, so I should image it and see if I can make a VM out of it instead of lugging it out of storage now and then.

The real grift was Capacity on Demand, which requires access keys to unlock hardware only IBM provides. That was a lot of "fun" when the system planar died and the new one didn't give me all my processors back. It took nearly a week to iron it out with IBM directly; even the VAR couldn't fix it.

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

#59

Post by WireWater »

raverbashing wrote: post #20
sys_64738 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "developed".

They get the maintenance money of people still running apps on there while changing/fixing one thing or another a year.

Fixes are keeping up with CVEs fairly quickly. The process is actually pretty good.

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

#60

Post by a-dub »

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/...

yeah it was actually a TUI. the screenshot looks right but the name "smit" doesn't sound familiar. i want to say it had a three letter name (this was circa 1996).

motif... lol

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