A month of AIX

[sawyl]

Having had something like a month's experience working seriously with AIX, I have to admit that I really rather like it. Or at least I do now that I've fixed my xterm function keys — I had to set it to use pre-VT100 PF keys — and now that we've got GNU coreutils installed in place of the default IBM utilities.

I like the fact that even though some of the commands are weird — lsfs anyone? — the naming scheme is generally pretty consistant, with mk* to set, ch* to change and ls* to inspect, so it's pretty easy to find the command you need to run to complete a particular task. And if you can't work out what you need to do, you can always look in smit to see what it recommends.

There are some areas I don't really like. I'm not terribly impressed by any OS that still stashes all its startup functions in inittab — although the presence of mkitab does go some way to making life easier.

And while the SRC daemon control system does have some nice features, it also has some major lacks, such as the ability to specify whether a signal can be used to refresh a daemon running under SRC control. In some respects, it feels a bit like a bad implementation of Cray's sdaemon from Unicos, which made it possible to specify groups of daemons in a configuration file, along with their start and stop methods — either scripts or the daemon itself — and, optionally, a PID file used to kill the daemon or to signal it to restart. OK, so it didn't feature SRC's fancier methods of control, but since the de facto standard for daemon management is signals, it might be nice if SRC was tweaked to provide better support for them.

I'm also not vastly impressed by any system that uses two completely separate package management systems to manipulate the installed software. Why not just use RPM or put everything under LPP control? After all, Red Hat seem to manage OK with just RPM.

But these are minor quibbles. In general, once the system has been tweaked to run GNU/AIX, it's actually pretty pleasant to use.