IBM provide a number of resources to keep up to date with security advisory announcements. IBM X-Force Exchange provide an API, IBM Support provide email notifications (along with RSS/Atom feeds), and there is also a JSON feed that comes from https://esupport.ibm.com/customercare/flrt/doc?page=aparJSON. For my requirements, I’ve found the JSON feed to contain the data that I need at a glance. I ..read more

More often than not, I find myself having to compare two Hardware Management Console (HMC) logical partition (LPAR) profile configurations. Sometimes this is to ensure that a profile in a disaster recovery site matches that of its production counterpart. Other times, it’s to make sure all members of a cluster have identical resource configurations. In a perfect world, I’d be manging the LPAR c ..read more

Most will be familiar with using the emgr command to install emergency fixes (eFixes) on AIX. You can additionally use a Network Installation Management (NIM) server in either a push or pull operation to install fixes, which is handy when deploying at scale (more on this later in the post with deploying fixes at scale with Puppet). Prepare NIM resources There is a little setup work that you f ..read more

There are several ways to find the WWPNs for a virtual fibre channel adapter. You can log into the individual LPAR’s, get them from the Hardware Management Console (HMC), or from another asset discovery tool that may contain this data. Using EZH functions originally written by Brian Smith, I’ve added a function named lparwwpn that takes a list of LPAR names as arguments, and prints the virtual ..read more

Something that I do quite frequently is verify that I have a valid mksysb image for the AIX LPAR that I’m about to make changes on (for example, before applying a service pack). You can do this from the AIX LPAR itself using the nimclient command. kristijan@aix13 # nimclient -l -L -t mksysb aix13 | grep aix13 aix13_220720_img mksysb aix13_220713_img mksysb kristijan@aix13 # nimclient ..read more