For years, PowerVM administrators have had to live with a certain inconsistency. Anyone who manages AIX on a daily basis appreciates the convenience of the alt_disk_install / alt_disk_copy mechanism—the ability to update…
AIX Froze During Boot? Use Verbose Mode to See What’s Going on Under the Hood
Every IBM Power Systems administrator eventually encounters the “Black Box” scenario: an LPAR is triggered to reboot, no Reference Code appears on the HMC, and the terminal remains frozen—often stuck on a…
Stop Wasting CPU Cycles: Hardware-Accelerated Compression on IBM Power
Data compression is standard requirement in modern IT infrastructure. We do it daily to save storage space and reduce network bandwidth. However, traditional software compression comes with a hidden tax—it is a…
Package Management in AIX: How to Enable autofsinstall and Say Goodbye to Manual Fileset Hunting
Every AIX administrator is familiar with this scenario: you start working in a new environment and find out that a necessary command is missing from the system. Until now, adding these tools…
RMC In-Band: The Quiet Revolution in AIX 7.3 TL4
If you’ve spent any time managing IBM Power environments, you know the drill: you deploy a new LPAR in an isolated VLAN, and… nothing. The HMC can’t see it. You end up…
AIX System Dump: Your Server’s “Flight recorder”
Even on the best-maintained LPAR partitions, critical errors (system crashes) can occur that you simply can’t predict. When the system suddenly crashes, you have two options: either you try to read tea…
IBM i (OS/400) The Database Operating System
Today, I wanted to show you one of the most fascinating and surprising operating systems ever created. It’s not another Unix, Linux, or Windows. It is an architecture that went its own…
ACID (SQL) and BASE (NoSQL) in databases
Why, in the cloud era, do we still keep these monolithic IBM Power Machines in our data centers? Isn’t it cheaper to rewrite everything into microservices and scatter it across thousands of…
AIX for Linux Administrators – part1
Introduction I frequently encounter curiosity among Linux administrators regarding what AIX administration looks like and how much it differs from what they already know. Most specialists are aware that Linux is derived…
XOPS – The Evolution of the IT Administrator
The role of the IT administrator is undergoing a transformation that is redefining the profession. In the past, this job was primarily associated with physically tending to servers and reactive firefighting in…