IBM

Most of these are probably due to sheer ignorance, but I still hate AIX's out of box experience. RIght off the bat, there is no SSH included, and you need to get the AIX Linux Toolbox for that (which is a whole new exercise in itself). They include every shell out there except bash and the default shell is ksh. According to online documentation on ksh, ksh supports completion via ESC-ESC. Tried that, didn't work. Doesn't even have a command history, and the command prompt is just a single $ or #, which is incredibly helpful.

I can't shift-tab upwards to check output. There is no less, only more which sucks more. Network connectivity is limited to plain old ftp, which AFAIK does not support auto file transfer type. Since there's no working web browser, if you want to download updates for AIX, you have to use a different computer to get to IBM's website, and then type in all the ftp commands on the AIX box. smitty is not smart enough to phone home for updates. The default partition/filesystem sizes are tiny and ridiculous, with no option to change this in the installer, and each upgrade necessitates at least several partition resizes, which at least AIX handles nicely since partitions don't have to be contiguous. But isn't that in itself inefficient? I found myself intentionally wasting some free space on the drive just so one of the many filesystems would still have space to expand into in the future. Hell if I know which.

dtsession panics and refuses to start the fugly window manager when you so much as change your hostname. The graphical AIX introductory assistant asks you to insert the disc and press Enter to continue, but fails to register the ENTER keypress when you finally hit it, because it's just a graphical shell around something that's better handled by smitty anyway. You need to install the AIX Linux Toolbox to get any modicum of general functionality, and there is of course NO dependency resolution.

Last but not least, the OS takes ages to boot. The only saving grace this OS has is that df has a -m and -g option, which lets you specify exactly whether you want volume sizes to be listed in megabytes or gigabytes, instead of the -h option on Linux which does a great enough job that I don't really care anyway.

If there's something I listed here that's annoying simply because I don't know how it works in AIX, please tell me. I certainly had a lot of patience the last time I got this working. I must've forgotten all the hard work to get all my favourite things up and running like the AIX Linux Toolbox, and eventually KDE3.

Is that ugly desktop CDE? I actually like CDE....

Anyways, the hostname problem is typical for unix. That generally means you didn't change it in all of the places, or didn't specify an fqdn when you should have, or dns is returning something else (this is rare, but rhel6 and solaris 11 are fairly dependent on external dns to be correct), etc... I would re-read the docs on it for your version of AIX and make sure you hit all of the right spots.

If you didn't set an fqdn because you don't think you have one, just use example.com.

concerning shell laziness...my .env file *gg*



and guess what...openssh is available a real smart admin here

me@somemachine:/home/me> ssh -v
OpenSSH_3.8.1p1, OpenSSL 0.9.6m 17 Mar 2004

What's funny is that a couple of interns could easily whip the UX into shape and bundle some more modern BSD stuff and provide a decent shell experience.

I remember seeing a while back IBM had some kind of Eclipse(rational) connector where you'd develop on Windows and it would save/build/run on the POWER box. I guess that's their solution.. use Windows as a head end

Solaris 10 and 11 are the only commercial *NIX that don't feel arcane to me without a custom env.

Those same interns would also attempt to improve "loadsa stuff" and in term break many mission critical applications that have been running for the last 20 years.

Yup, I reckon those interns could leave their mark.

For every spotty intern who moans about not using zsh or git I'll point to ten people getting real work done.

Things apparently break anyway without improving the UX (AIX 5.2 WPARs as a "feature"...)

I hardly see how a decent shell profile and some commands will cause full system meltdown. Throw any conflicts into /usr/bsd/ or /usr/gnu and let the user choose if they need something weird for software that went beyond standards in the first place. My AIX machines are all outfitted nicely and it doesn't hamper the base system.

And yeah, nobody does real work with BSD and it always breaks. zsh and git will hose your system if installed and have no productivity merits

What pisses me off is kids who write shell scripts and add "#!/bin/zsh" at the top and claim they are being hyperproductive because of it, and instead have made a script that then won't work on the target systems because, funnily enough they didn't have and previously didn't need zsh until the spotty erk decided that they could override the change control of an organisation.

Similar with GIT, just because you use GIT on your favourite FOSS project does not mean you have to force it onto every server you see, having a distributed system that works well using SVN is not magically improved by breaking everything to satisfy your GIT evangelism.

That's a symptom of other failures. Being shiny new feature guy isn't any better than being stuck in the past. Shell scripts should try damn hard to stick to POSIX for obvious reasons, but zsh is fine as an interactive shell. Standards rule for the backend, but frontends can have some sugar.

While I use git on my own projects, SVN maps better to the 40-hour-week-programmer and especially managers. That said, I have yet to see a large project where git bisect wouldn't have been useful at some point. The mature programmer will note things like this when doing tool selection. For example, if I am enthusiastic about git, I can use it with an SVN repo without affecting the organization. If I identify a large inefficiency where git may solve problems (i.e. lots of remote employees), only then is it worth presenting for a a tough migration.

But we're getting a bit off thread topic.. the stuff I'm calling for is mundane. Decent TTY/termcap handling, bump to nvi or include vim in addition to the SysV vi, tab completion by default, shell history, add a useful prompt, etc. If these changes break things, the department (IBM or ISV, wherever the breakage is) need to reevaluate themselves for competence.

1. ssh is on the second DVD (I think) Pretty sure bash is on there too.

2. ksh is ace! You need to set your editor to vi and all your vi commands work...

set -o vi

Command history is esc-k, command completion is esc-\, esc-x to delete a character etc.......

3. ssh above includes ssh

4. Aside the fact that smitty is for girls, you can download (for now) updates via 'smitty suma', if a girl, or just 'suma' if a real man.

5. The LVM and BOS are the main things I love about AIX, LV's are deliberately kept small to enable reasonably sized mksysb's - application data should be kept in separate VG's This results in a box that can recovered in 15 mins from DVD, tape or NIM.