Being away for quite sometime....

[Pando]

Dear Gurus,

I was away from the HP-UX world for quite sometime.... :-(
But now am back in the game again...
I have a coupleof questions in general:

1. What is the big difference between AIX and HP-UX (other than spelling..)? :-)
2. How would i bridge from HP-UX to AIX?

Thank you and hope you could enlighten me ....

[Wilfred Chau_1 · Accepted solution]

This may help

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246767.html

[Bill Hassell]

How many books are you willing to read?

AIX tends to create its own version of Unix so it can be very different. You will find nothing in common with I/O (addressing, device files, I/O commands). LVM will be familiar but SMIT is not like SAM or SMH at all. A useful comparison tool is the Rosetta Stone:

http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Can you spell "ODM" [Object Data Management] ? Get familiar with it in AIX. It's akin to the Windows registry.

AIX LVM is similar to HP-UX's except the noun-verb command structure is reversed. In HP-UX you do things like 'vgdisplay' [noun/verb]. In AIX the corresponding command would be 'lsvg' [verb/noun] as in "list volume group".

While the original Unix philosophy was to consider configuration files human-readable and human-editable, AIX is replete with special commands to edit configuration files. I even find that some of the manpages lead you to believe that dire things will happen if you don't use these special commands to edit the configuration file in question.

AIX deviates from some of the standard file names. Where you want to look at '/etc/fstab' you need to look to '/etc/filesystems'.

AIX SMIT is much finer than HP-UX SAM was and in my opinion, it is a good thing to use at least initially. Examining the SMIT logs after you ask it to perform some task will shed great insight into what you would have cone at command line.

I'll take HP-UX any day if I have a choice, but you can learn to live with anything if you keep an open mind.

Regards!

...JRF...

[klb]

I'd like to add that while IBM has blazed a trail sort of away from the others in terms of it's AIX, the end product is quite stable and is fairly easy to manage ( back in the 4.2 days anyway :).

I learned long ago using SMITTY ( SMIT ) and using the 'display command' key ( F6 I think? ) to see the actual commands being issued by the GUI. After a year or so, I went to command line only, despite AIX's sometimes dogged insistence to use the native 'tool' or command.

The LVM is nearly identical to HP's LVM, with the command names all different, but still similar. Functionality of those commands compare nicely and will be intuitive to any HPUX admin.

If you need to do any install or recovery, get yourself a copy of the hardware and install manuals for your machine type ( IBM.COM ) and become familiar with IBM's way of dealing with media boots, system crashes and crash dumps and the codes that are displayed on the machine's front panel ( some of this info may be a bit outdated as I'm not privy to any of the new hardware since a long time ago ).

Get acquanted with mksysb and be sure to use it to generate system recovery image on tape ( roughly equivalent to make_tape_recovery on HPUX ).

I agree that HPUX and AIX are worlds apart in terms of their I/O hardware management. However, like me, you might find that AIX's approach in this respect was geared toward ease of use and as such, is easier on the admin! That is arguable and is somewhat outdated, but I'll risk putting it out there ( my AIX stent ended before 5.2, we'd just went from Microchannel to PCI and never had a SAN, just used SSA enclosures w/direct connect ).

Hth,

-klb

[Pando]

Thanks JRF. :-)

[Pando]

Thanks to all. This forum is very helpful indeed. I still remember back in the days when I post, i get a quick reply /answers from the community. Many thanks..