Callandor

So, I recently started a job as a Unix Systems Administrator at a large three-letter company. My previous experience with Unix had been, well, Linux. I’ll try to catalog some of the joys and annoyances I’ve discovered while working on HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, and even some OSF1.

JFS is a joy.

Why? One command:

# chfs -a size=+10G /dev/hd10opt

And you have just resized a filesystem, online. No unmounting of the filesystem and no downtime! I actually look forward to requests for more disk space on AIX systems because it is so easy. HP-UX’s vxfs is almost as nice (unless you want to extend / or /stand), but since you have to unmount the file system, it often means you go into single user mode to do it.

ksh may be ubiquitous, but give me bash any day. I’m just so used to tab-completion of commands, and the arrow keys not inserting gibberish while allowing me to edit my command or go back and forward in my command history. I tried for a bit to get those to work in ksh, but never got it working everywhere. So now I just type “bash” on machines I log into and hope. Even the AIX 4.3 machine I worked on yesterday had bash installed. Why can’t every Unix?

An install of RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.2 presented me with something so simple I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. It said, “You will need CDs 1, 2, and 4 for this install. Press Reboot if you need to go back, or Continue to start the install.” Knowing what you need before you need it? Priceless.

AIX’s System Management Interface Tool got smarter in between AIX 5.3 and 6.1. On two machines (a 5.3 and a 6.1), I had to install different locales (languages and cultural conventions) so the developers could test in those locales. These are kept on the install CDs, so annoyingly on both I had to play the CD switcheroo game. But 5.3 would fail the install if ANY of the locales I selected for install were not found on the disk. So if I tried to install French and Japanese, it would fail, but if I then tried just French from the same CD, it worked. It was sort of unfriendly. 6.1 on the other hand, said “Please insert disk X and press Enter” a few times for different disks, and I could select all the ones I wanted up front. So useful.

AIX has some cool things, but it also can be annoying because it does things differently. With the bootlist command, you can change the next boot device while the server is up and running. But, the BIOS-boot-order equivalent is hard to catch and is not named clearly. Lesson: Google it before trying what works on x86 hardware.

Solaris 8 comes out of the box quite insecure. I mean all sorts of insecure remote login and DDoS-inviting daemons enabled, nevermind the old versions of various software like sendmail. At least I haven’t yet had to touch the older Solaris installs we have lying around. I did have to touch an AIX 4.3.3 box and a RedHat box with a 2.2 kernel though :(

I’m currently fighting with a SuSE install on a PPC box, that is connected to an HMC. We lost root access to it, so I’m trying to get it to boot from CD, but haven’t been able to get it to do so. Dumb thing.