Back when I dealt with AIX (1997-2001) it was common to deride it on usenet as “UNIX by and for drunk aliens” but I myself enjoyed its very regular naming conventions and extremely low footprint whilst under intensive memory load, which was common back then when RAM was stratospherically expensive. Excellent NUMA support too.
I think binary configuration files requiring specialized editors weren't all that popular. We had a RS6000 box in the lab, originally acquired to assure compatibility of our enterprise NAS appliance with AIX. Nobody liked that box and as Linux won the Unix wars, we were relieved that we didn't have to deal with it.
(and yes, while Linux was then the (much) preferred choice, we had prior experience with other *nixes)
I used to get a kick out of how the lil 'running man' in SMIT would fall over if a command failed :-P More sense of humour then I gave IBM credit for :-D
yeah it was actually a TUI. the screenshot looks right but the name "smit" doesn't sound familiar. i want to say it had a three letter name (this was circa 1996).
IBM sells (sold?) a thing called the HMC that manages multiple AIX machines, and their LPAR/WPARs. It was a web interface, maybe that is what you remember?
It had a dedicated 1U server you had to buy too lol, what a grift
Yeah, that's what started turning me off modern systems. None of my earlier hardware required it, but my POWER6 did. You can do some things in ASMI but if you want to reconfigure an LPAR or (horrors) add one, then you're digging out the HMC. It was just an off the shelf IBM x86 system running Linux, so I should image it and see if I can make a VM out of it instead of lugging it out of storage now and then.
The real grift was Capacity on Demand, which requires access keys to unlock hardware only IBM provides. That was a lot of "fun" when the system planar died and the new one didn't give me all my processors back. It took nearly a week to iron it out with IBM directly; even the VAR couldn't fix it.
I run my HMC in a VM running in libvirtd. IIRC, IBM provided the image as a VMware appliance, but it was quite simple to convert to something open source (at the cost of being an unsupported configuration, but it's not as if I could afford an IBM sorry contact to start with), and the result works great with my single POWER7 machine (8233-E8B)
