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Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's No. 1 airline Qantas will shift their underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's AIX next month as part of a wide-ranging technology transformation project. 'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment — we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation. The decision was made last year, as part of the planning for the rollout."
AIX is really old, mature, and definitely still maintained. It's a very good system.
I expect it will eventually be retired and replaced with Linux, but that's still years down the road. Right now, it offers some advantages, particularly on minicomputer class hardware.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
All slashdotters should threaten to boycott Quantas until they give tech details of where The Penguin went wrong...... Wait, who's Quantas?
Table-ized A.I.
If there system was unstable it was probably their system design and not the OS.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in.
And no, AIX is not dead, not any more than BSD is anyway.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Couldn't they at least switch to a real UNIX? Man I'd hate to be working IT for THAT migration. I've never been a huge fan of ACHES, and I've had to do migrations to it and they were just an incredible pain. IBM have this thing where they like to undercut the competition. Management sees he Bottom Line Price and tends not to listen to IT telling them that, no, you can't just copy all the applications over to the IBM box just because IBM told you that UNIX is UNIX. Gah.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
The declaration by Quanta's officers sounds quite strange.
Instability can be brought up by inconsistent system management, like using different software version (either library, applications or operating systems, it doesn't matter).
If they plan to solve those issues with AIX (or any other operating system, even Windows) with no system management change, they are very likely to reproduce the very same stability issues.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It is a good example showing why IBM supports Linux:
1. Hook up customers on a cheaply solution based on Linux and MySQL.
2. As customer's data and number of clients grow they will start experiencing scalability problems.
3. Propose much more scalable, reliable, dependable (and much more expensive) solution on AIX, AS/400, Mainframe.
4. Profit!
AIX is hardly obsolete. Over half of our clients with large server systems use IBM hardware and AIX. IBM hardware tends to be cheaper than other vendors, and AIX itself is a very stable operating system and easy to configure and maintain via SMIT. There are many advantages to AIX: cheaper hardware, powerful POWER5 architecture to run on (IBM hardware scales quite nicely), decent support, and it is maintained by one of the oldest technology companies in America. Compared to Solaris and HP-UX, it's one of the best UNIX flavors out there, and doesn't have the stability problems seen with Linux. Linux is stable, but still quirky.
IBM still maintains AIX. It's not reaching end of support like Tru64 or OpenVMS, and with POWER6 and POWER7 coming in the future, will likely enjoy a long, long support future.
Well, the average slashdotter will scream when they read this because it goes agaist the inamovible myth that "you cannot go wrong with Linuzzz", but the reality out there is another: every OS has it's good and bad sides and leaving OS religion aside, will always result in migration in both directions. Many things depend also on personal preferences, ie, what people which work with the system will fell confortable with. I hope more and more people will leave the OS extremal religion out of the picture and will use whatever tool they feel confortable with, be it Linuzz, Windows, Open Ofice, MS Office, BeOS, CrapOS or whatever.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Moving from one Unix to another isn't really news. Moving to Vista would be news.
C'mon, we've seen this so many times. They're only making that announcement so that Linus will come to the party and offer them a fantastic price cut on Linux.
It's worked for just about every large company that's threatened to abandon Microsoft.
AIX still exists? Why?
Besides mainframe and midrange systems, that's what you'd call "big iron".
Of course, you can try to cut corners on the high end workstations too. If they purchase the machines without support contracts and they don't get regular maintenance those AIX machines will be pretty unstable in a couple of years, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You missed the memo. Bill said that we are suppose to keep a low profile when we are working. Keep in mind that we are only paid if it appears real.
You realise that "no longer developed anymore and largely obsolete" is just another way of saying stable. I know companies that kept using VMS and or mainframe OSs that were almost completely dead - no maintaince updates, no license fees even - right up until the hardware couldn't be fixed anymore.
After that, they had a hellish time with toy PC hardware and OSs. And yup, from the point of view of customers like these, all desktop hardware and OSs are toys. They have a bunch of additional features that don't add to the usefulness of the system at all, and vastly increase it's attack surface. And they need a load of updates/upgrades which occasionally introduce other bugs, and need so the customer needs to pay for 24 hour support to fix the system when this happens.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's a claim I never expected to hear.
n/t
I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX
I'm sure that IBM makes more selling AIX licences then Linux licenses. IBM hardware for AIX is probably more expensive then x86 Linux hardware too.
AIX is a very mature and well supported unix os. frankly for business use it shits on linux. business is not interested in cutting edge.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Would that be called "Expenguination" ?
Surrely, if they are having problem's with Linux stability, it must be the general manager for segmentation's fault?
Qantas never crash... on linux
In the end, we have no way to determine whether this move made any sense or was FUD by IBM as some other poster implied. AIX on a cheap x86 cluster? Possibly a bad idea. AIX on their IBM mainframe? Possibly a better choice than Linux.
As much as I love Linux it's - as we all should already know - not always the best choice as it's only one of many tools that must fit the general architecture and requirements.
:/- spoon(_).
I've been pretty happy with Linux in general, but I'm not thrilled with its network file system support. In particular, NFS has been prone to occasionally leave a particular file in a state where any process that tries to access it hangs in the kernel, and only a system reboot (!) fixes the problem. I'm hoping this was fixed between 2.6.10 and 2.6.20, which I've just upgraded our systems to.
Xen is also less solid than I'd like, at least on the dual Xeon server board I'm running it on. I've had a couple of bizarre issues with Xen 3.0 now that make me wonder if I should go back (again - I tried an older 3.0 before and rolled back due to network bugs) to 2.0 .
Overall Linux is pretty damn good as a server OS, but I can certainly imagine someone finding and moving to a more stable system - though it'd probably be at the cost of ease of administration, speed of deploying services, etc.
they got a notice from SCO
What?
At least it fixes the problem until the migration is over, then all bets are off.
:) AIX is a wonderful OS from what I hear.
In this day and age, if your root cause analysis comes up with "Linux is unstable" then something is screwed up with your analysis. Still this doesn't affect me, so good luck with that.
OpenVMS is not reaching end of support.
Why? Because for all the wonderful things we can do with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. A lot. It's done many wonderful things for UNIX and the IT industry as a whole and will continue to do so. But it's not ZOMG TEH BEST OS EVAR! for every project, and I don't think Linus ever intended it to be :)
Beauty is just a light switch away.
Don't forget AIX is a commercial product, like Windows, and according to the size of the server, so is the price of the OS, counting to (sometimes tens) thousands of dollars, for each systems. The prices are not fixed, discounts may be done by IBM, and the more important, as there is a price for the OS, some discount may not go the customer, but to other hands.... Think about it...
Ok, put it as experience.. Put it as bias...
:( )
;)
But in my experience and that of many others. linux is flexible... fast.. versatile.. but the most stable it isnt.. its part of its design goal. A stable OS, has stable developement practices.. Linux's goal is not to have a stable dev practice. ( see the whole spew about bin drivers..
Why do you guys think redhat has RHEL... to stabilize linux. go to any other distrib, and well.. things change often.
Fast change does not bode well with stability. Stability comes with time.
You want fast and cheap, go linux.
You want stable, you go commercial unix ( Solaris,AiX these days)
You want a good middle ground.. you go *BSD
( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )
A great example of why it makes sense to avoid using MS operating systems - if you have problems with Linux you can move over to AIX without too much difficulty. If you're having problems with AIX move your apps to BSD. Problems with BSD try Solaris.
Having problems with Windows . . . you're fscked!
In addition to that IBM has done a relatively good job to ensure that porting applications is a breeze, especially to-from linux. It used to be the case where migration from Solaris to linux and back was the easiest. IMO, nowdays, AIX has overtaken it in that respect.
In addition to that, if Qantas does not have sufficiently good application level fallback and has to rely on the hardware being rock solid, AIX is another obvious choice. You get clearly better MTB compared to a PC based server under Linux. Everything else aside you have working hardware monitoring and management which under linux is still a problem. Add to that some noises IBM is making about binary compatibility and you get a fairly compelling deal for a large company which runs a lot of custom software (which I bet was initially written for a mainframe and expects the hardware + OS to have 99.95+ year round availability).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Not many people will know how to hack into it.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I see the parent is talking in jest.. but seriously... does Qantas contemplate AIX on every single client desktop for running a non-browser AIX-specific application? Linux is only one small part of the 'Open Source' stack. The ability to run 'standards compliant, open-protocls-based systems on commodity hardware' is the benefit of the 'Linux' approach. Merely changing the server(s) to AIX will not do, for other customers who simply cannot see any value for the dollars spent.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Lets please stress on the POWER5 part.
I have used AIX on both POWER and POWERPC based systems. It really, really sucks on POWERPC. Well, actually, the hardware sucks, and AIX just sucks as a side effect.
I remember using AIX since the good old POWER2 days (Risc/6000 320 and others). It was already rock solid on those days.
morcego
My first experience with AIX was auditing some large set of application C code. It was shocking, lots of uninitialized local vars, code assuming it to be 0, and it worked!
I suppouse someone at IBM decided to systematically clear stack var area at function entry... better that than to fix the broken code!.
What's in a sig?
*Everyone* knows that there is AIX code in Linux!
They probably didnt even need to recompile the code...
Solaris is so stable its scary.
I agree, AIX is a dream compared to IRIX which is what my shop currently uses. I can't wait for our migration to AIX.....
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
We all know about -froot don't we?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Not that I could not see good reasons for dumping Linux, but the whole story to me sounds a bit like hastedly buying and setting up x86 hardware, throw Linux at it, and hoping for the best ... .
Oh, yes, disregarding application quality and support.
Suddenly, you find that the method above is flaky and flimsy ? Fork out real money for real hardware, and be surprised to see it doing real work. To me, I wouldn't be surprised.
Had they asked me as a consultant, I might have suggested SUN and Solaris.
And to sack the responsible for bringing in cheap and off-the-shelf solutions in the first place.
Still, I think if managed properly, Linux might be able to do the job as well.
Penguins don't fly.
[ducks (do)]
AIX won't be on PC, was the Linux installation on PC? If so, it may be more to do with the limitations of the PC architecture. There are probably other ways around the problem but they'll cost and you'll lose some of the benefits of OTS hardware.
or maybe you just don't know.
You are saying that you can't get support with Linux, in essence one of the arguments I most often hear when people opt for Microsoft. But IBM does support Linux on their servers, of course not all distributions.
It IS possible to get support, that is why companies can make money from Open Source, they can't sell the software, but they can sell support, test a distribution on their hardware and certify it.
OpenVMS reaching end of support? Since when? Last time I looked it was still very much being developed and maintained on Itanic and axp platforms. Only on the VAX platform is it reaching end of support (which is probably still a few years off).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
1) Linux is just another flavor of UNIX.
2) it is NOT the most stable flavor of UNIX.
3) it is NOT to most feature packed flavor of UNIX.
4) it is far from being the most scaleable flavor of UNIX.
5) it does have some of the most lacking documentation I've seen since Microport UNIX.
This has NOT stopped me from using Slackware since 1994.
I miss my SunOS... :p
Compared to Windows, Linux seems stable, but compared to most commercial operating systems its kinda flaky...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
"Isn't IBM AIX really old, not really developed any longer and largely obsolete? How can moving from linux to that be a good idea?"
AIX is mature, it is stable, it is well maintained, and it is not obsolete. AIX hardware and software are more much more reliable and stable than Linux and the hardware that it runs on. AIX will be supported for a very long time. Linux is very good in smaller, less demanding environments; AIX, HPUX, and Solaris are the gold standard of large enterprise level systems.
If you're really want to help, invest time and effort in improving Linux, and stay away from flamewars :)
-- Sig down
10 years ago, I jumped onto the Linux bandwagon. Last year, I started brushing up my Solaris skills and I'm now working to add some Sun certs to my RHCE.
:)) and forsake many useful updates and features in tools like Samba and then you'll get your stable API / ABI. Or you can go with a bleeding edge distro and never have ISV support for your products. Neither of these is a great choice for us, we'd like something in the middle, but I can't find a commercial vendor providing this today.
Linux just is NOT ready for the enterprise. Red Hat, the 'biggest' Linux company out there just hasn't learnt to run with the big dogs yet.
Technical issues about the OS aside, Red Hat just don't present as a professional company. After dealing with Sun and MS for years, dealing with RH is a bit of a joke. £300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling. Trial versions of the software to keep your skills up to date ? Don't be silly - you have to use CentOS for the free tools and you're SOL for their closed source tools like Satellite or RHN Proxy.
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
At a technical level, Linux is NOT keeping up and is barely fit for datacentre purposes. Only recently has the LVM stuff got to a useful level where we can do multipathing (with IO on both paths) without needing third party software. It's not great yet, and the tools to maintain it are badly documented, but since we just can't get Veritas for 64bit RHEL4 (or couldn't when I checked a few months back), it's the only choice we have.
The constant changes to the API and ABI are a total PITA for ISVs. You can either go with RHEL / SLES (or CentOS if you're broke like me
Lastly, the tools. I'd really rather not get started on the issues with the tools that RH provides to manage systems. Suffice to say, not being able to do LVM setup using the text installer came as a bit of a shock. And when confronting RH on the severe deficiencies in their text-based admin tools, I was just told to spend 8k on a closed source RH product to resolve these... How much MORE like MS can you be? Yeah, we know the base product is a bit broken, but that part isn't really our focus - here, try this expensive fix.
Documentation is in a similar state with some stuff being very well documented and other stuff, poorly if at all.
In the end, Sun still have a better understanding of what the enterprise needs, both from a support and an OS point of view.
4. Bundle the fastest service response time w/said expensive solution.
5. Profit!
IBM made their rep w/me late one night in rural Vermont. I was troubleshooting my client's sole server (an ancient AIX rig) and shit started coming up wonky (hardware!?!?). This wasn't the sort of operation that had spare parts sitting around.
Worse yet, the client had all 14 of their locations (all running dumb terminals) running through this one server and their inventory and POS systems were going to be offline in the morning unless...
I still can't believe the response time for what had to be one of IBM's smallest, most outdated corporate clients. The IBM tech coordinated everything w/a third party on-site technician & we were up & running with shiny new parts in a matter of two hours (most of which was travel time)... Which gave me an hour or two to sleep before calling the company Pres in the morning to explain why they were going to have a big ole IBM bill in the mail.
You pay IBM for the absence of downtime, and it is worth every cent.
Regards.
I have no problem running linux at home, I reboot every 2 month usually for hardware upgrades...
However the company we worked for bought a SUSE raid pc for us. And the hardware incl. Raid 5 was not stable. I basically won't blame the kernel, but distributions for packaging and vendors for their hardware.
Some kernel modules are of course not too stable. Personally I had problems with software raid once, but somehow it's mostly hardware related in the end. The scheduling and the internals are very stable and reliable.
--
Linux 2.6.19-gentoo-r5 #6 PREEMPT Mon Mar 19 19:54:39 CET 2007 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
Especially on large x86_64 SMP hardware, and some on NFS.
If you're uncertain of this, I recommend checking out the change logs for 2.6.19 - 2.6.21.
At least one of the 8 core opteron boxes I maintain hit an interrupt bug and died.
2.6.20.4 fixed a number of my issues, random pauses, and NFS time outs. Haven't tried 2.6.21 yet.
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
When you buy AIX you don't just buy an OS, you buy the hardware as well. As Apple fanboys know, it is MUCH easier to get stable software if you know exactly what kind of hardware you are going to run on.
YES it is possible to run linux on this hardware too, this is IBM after all, BUT even then you are running an OS that is designed to run on much more. AIX isn't.
Isn't linux on PC hardware stable? Nope.
And yes, I do run linux on my desktop and it is pretty damn stable, BUT I have had crashes and freezes over the last couple of years. Even one on a light server that only runs apache.
No, nothing like the famed windows crashes and forced reboots every single day BUT if you run a major company and a computer hiccups once every 3 years that still can mean a significant amount of downtime over all your machines combined.
Saying AIX is more stable then Linux is roughly like claiming a diesel truck is more reliable then a pretrol powered van. It is not really a slam against van's, just that trucks are in a different class entirely.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, you are right. I have seen large BSD deployments and they are extremely stable. Personally, I am a big proponent of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. They are very stable which might explain why there is less bleeding edge hardware support. I am actually not surprised at all.
And it's also a handy expression to use when your unsupported Linux distro falls in a heap... R HEL!
*ducks*
There's freedom of choice with Microsoft
If you have problems with Windows XP, you can move over to Windows Vista.
And as an added bonus, then you'll realise that things that much fscked up under Windows XP in comparison, and you'll happily move back to XP.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
and you'll get the same service.
I had to migrate a system from AIX to Linux once because it stopped working from one of the thousand reasons you mention.
It had a customer database in Oracle running on AIX. There was an engineering application that accessed the database and did some calculations in FORTRAN. Then, in version 8, Oracle dropped support for FORTRAN.
The AIX machine was running out of disk space and CPU power, the hardware upgrade meant necessarily going to Oracle 8 and our FORTRAN app would stop working. I don't know, perhaps Oracle 7 would run in the new hardware, but Oracle refused to make a contract for version 7 for that hardware. End result: we had to rewrite the interface between the application and the database. AIX development systems are rather mediocre, so we got a Dell system with Linux.
OK, I know someone will say "AIX development systems are GREAT!!!", but it just ain't so. We tried and tried for months, but the overall code development went much quicker and smoother in an improvised Linux box than in AIX with support from IBM. When you have a problem it's much quicker to google the answer than wait while the IBM support chain reaches the guy who has the solution.
'with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days'
What ever has the Redhat support process come to?
What was their response to your support request?
What exactly was the problem with the machines locking up?
davecb5620@gmail.com
'£300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling'
OK, I can see a theme emerging here in this thread. I like Linux except a) no support ) no software c) company used cardboard. This is meant to be a joke isn't it?
'Subscriptions take the pain out of purchasing software because they provide everything needed in one all-inclusive price'
was: And so it starts (Score:3, it sure does)
davecb5620@gmail.com
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
That's how you need to read a headline like that. Some random company, no matter how large, switching some services (I doubt they're switching everything, I doubt they even know what everything they're running on Linux is) from one version of UNIX to another shouldn't be a big deal. Whether it's switching from Solaris to AIX, Solaris to Linux, Solaris to FreeBSD, AIX to Linux, SCO to FreeBSD, HPUX to AIX, SCO to OSX, HPUX to Linux, or Linux to AIX.
The whole POINT to open systems is that you CAN make these kinds of changes without them being disruptive. Nobody should be surprised by them.
here are many advantages to AIX: cheaper hardware, powerful POWER5 architecture to run on (IBM hardware scales quite nicely), decent support, and it is maintained by one of the oldest technology companies in America.
Adding to that list, you can add that they don't try to pull support stunts with hardware and dig their heels in when they transition to a more open form.
IBM still maintains AIX.
They dont play the games in shortening the lifespan like one of their competitors does. Now IBM'd move away from some insecure defaults in authentication...
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Linux/x86 has forced IBM, Sun and HP to be competitive with much cheaper hardware and support and when pricing servers with 32GB+ of ram, there isn't much difference between Linux/x86/support and AIX/HPUX/Solaris and when you do TCO analysis, they are all very similar.
There has been a major drop in the high end *nix distributed computing environment pricing brought on by Linux, to the point where it isn't that much of a cost savings switching between Linux and HPUX/AIX/Solaris (or the other way). I don't agree that AIX is more stable than Linux, but AIX isn't that much more expensive anymore.
Anonymous Coward said:
e xt=aix+unix&lastndays=0&location=&minsalary=0&maxs alary=&submit.x=405&submit.y=12">aix unix 1 vacancy found. Linux 10 vacancies found.
Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)
'I am both AIX and Red Hat certified so I kinda know what I'm talking about'
I would believe you even if you didn't invoke your credentials to support your claims. Personally, I only have a Diploma in IT from some RedBrick technical college. I have worked at ISPs and a fortune 500 company. The ISPs invariably used BsdUnix and *never* had a crash. The fortune 500 used Windows2000/05/06 and were for ever remaking broken exchange profiles and rebooting the servers as the Fax service had crashed over the weekend and no one could send them a fax. Is there anyone here that has had a good expericence with Linux.
Generally the job market tells you what is the current hot technology. Luckly I never bothered to learn Java, like I'm not going to bother to learn dot.whatever.they.are.going.to.call.it.next
http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/browse/index.jsp?freet
davecb5620@gmail.com
Writing this as AC, because many here will most likely don't like this comment, but...
.msi file is it? Same with things like editing xorg.conf to get a 10button mouse to work, which inevitably leads to a few failed boots because of some tiny errors, or editing the IP-tables.
Linux has the problem that it's too fragmented. There are 20 million distro's out there, and not one that's as easy to use and as workable on various hardware as Windows.
People should stop trying to make their ultimate distro number 20million1 and just make a few distro's that are adaptable, and that actually work.
The linux nerds are too much like "ooohw, that's easy, just pop up bash, and run #tar zxvf program_name.tar.gz #configure #make #make install #make clean
Well, that's not really easy for the average user that's used to double-clicking a
It's just not user-friendly.
Same with hardware support. Linux users should pressure companies more to provide Linux drivers, or like that initiative started a while ago, where spare-time programmers offer their services to create Linux-drivers under non-disclosure agreements. I've got an HP Color LaserJet 1600. Doesn't properly work in Linux. I've got a Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman. I haven't been able to get that to properly work either.
Or how about phone synchronising software?
I love linux, I really do, but to be frank, useability, hardware support, etc, sucks big time. Even if it's there, it's impossible to implement for johnny average.
Linux users and programmers should get their acts together, and stop making the millions of fragmented distro's, and make a few that actually and properly work. Where hardware works just as easy as it does on Windows, where you can tell the firewall to show a pop-up if a program wants internet access instead of silently blocking it.
I know that if we all combine our efforts we can make an operating system that's both easy to use for john average, aswell as powerfull enough for the 1337, and just works on all hardware be it a Core2Duo, AMD64 or PPC, but we gotta unite because currenty we still ain't achieving much, and are always a bit behind on stuff that even windows just supports.
my 2 cents..
Was it an Oracle+Linux stability issue?
"Qantas's original plans called for a totally Oracle-based solution, but
that was subsequently shifted to a multi-vendor approach to better match
Qantas's specific needs, according to Young."
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Its a good choice, I work as an AIX engineer ( Both on the software and P-series Hardware ) and its very possible its the most stable platform I've ever worked on.. Quite unlike the Vista'd laptop I write this comments on - NO I don't want to block that!! At least when IBM do a job, it gets done properly.
AIX is every bit as obsolete as zOS.
Not at all.
They are just very stable, very mature operating systems. When you reach that level, not all change is good.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
IBM has a secret - SMP/E - a super dooper software management database that knows everything about everything.
Their 2nd secret is that the hardware assist gets useful dumps, and people actually read them, and fix problems. This is probably why MS dumped NT on the ALPHA, because it was intolerant of buggy software.
AIX and MVS/ZOS don't have memory leaks, and hardware assist quickly fingers any culprits.
MS is just too lazy/indifferent to fix its own, and scaling comes to grief, as memory structures crumble.
Stability comes down to management, and true software engineering. Qantas is in the lucky position of being able to reward 'on-line sleuths' with free flights - which they do not presently do. They could lure any of the top 100 Linux experts for a look-see. One suspects within a week of going AIX, several application (not OS) errors will be identified and fixed, then they can go back to Linux. Going one or the other - and a sercretive structure that does not want outsiders pointing out technical incompetence or inexperience.
BTW, AIX is a good move, but licence costs will ensure fewer test systems, and create other risks. Let's hope they learn when conversions go sour.
The flip to AIX has nothing to do with stability. IBM is Qantas's systems support vendor. They actually have the ability to recommend system level changes to Qantas in the Guise of helping Qantas out. AIX also means new P series hardware installations. Hardware installation in the enterprise space are insanely expensive. Since the majority of the cost has support not the actually gear. This move to AIX is clearly motivated by money. Lots of money for IBM. Qantas was sold the system stability story and they bought it. Now IBM the primary vendor of also the bleeding edge "EQ" system also has more time to iron out the MONSTER bugs with the software system and get to charge Qantas for, system porting, new hardware, systems consultation and EXPENSIVE consultation hours. The only thing wrong with the Linux installation was that the system builds of Linux being used were not documented at all by IBM. Thus they were impossible to maintain. Let alone build again the same way. This whole port to AIX stinks of poor management and greed.
The perfect design, the perfect programmers, the perfect product...Yada yada yada... Their are dozens of reasons company choose not to use Linux for business critical apps, this is just one of them
AIX is a unix implementation, just like Linux. In theory, the one is a drop-in replacement for the other. (As we know, in practice, theory and practice are not the same.) The differences are in the details; Linux seems to run on anything with a mains lead, whereas AIX is tightly bound to IBM hardware.
Really, this is a non-story; just like saying that instead of buying their bread from Warburtons they are going to start buying it from Kingsmill, or saying that they are going to buy circuit breakers from MK instead of Volex. It's a nice promotional piece for IBM, no doubt, but that's about all it is. A standardised product originally sourced from one manufacturer is going to be sourced from a different manufacturer instead.
Now, if they were moving over to Windows or something, then we could worry. As things stand, the worst they will have to do is recompile some of their applications. And they retain the option to revert back at any stage in future.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Ok, so here goes.
./ account number is 5 digits(as well as my ICN number, yeah who cares). I am also in school working with HPC(High performance computing) building, programming and maintaining beowulf clusters. My point is this, I have more experience with Linux than most.
.debian.org/msg17434.html
Big Freaking Disclaimer, I work for IBM in support...
That being said, I use Linux as my primary desktop both at work(thank you IBM) and at home. Debian on both, though I do have to say, I just built a MythTV box and used Ubuntu(faster updates/multimedia/interface acceptable to the female counterpart) and I am VERY impressed with Fiesty Fawn 7.0.4. I have been running Linux since the pre-1.0 kernels and it has been my desktop of choice since 98 and my
Being that I work at IBM, I also have alot of experience with AIX. While personally, I hate AIX(any UNIX that cannot be administered via vi is shit in my book, take that any way you like), AIX is EXTREMELY stable, and IBM makes sure of it. I have seen the testing they do to both the hardware and software(OS level at least) and it is centered around stability/reliability first and foremost, followed closely by serviceability(tracing facilities, error reporting/recording), performance and then ease of use. Now, this order is not true of all commercial UNIXs, Solaris is used more in scientific applications/number crunching and tends to focus a bit more on performance over serviceability(surely) and possibly even stability. I have seen more Solaris machines bite it than AIX machines, but this is more likely hardware related that OS related. In either case, they are inherently more stable than Linux.
Yeah, I said it, and its true. While Linux is a WONDERFUL and EXCITING desktop OS, and makes a damn fine department server, the OS itself, and not even so much the OS, the kernel is pretty darn stable(dont believe me, boot up a Linux machine and dont do anything, it will run until something harware/power related dies). It is the surrounding libraries and applications that are not quite up to snuff. We in support see this a number of times. Here is an example:
Currently today, right now, PDKSH that is available on http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/ is completely broken when it comes to job control. Now most of you have no clue what I mean by that, but a quick explanation is placing jobs into the background with a '&' at the end of the command line. Now programmatically, there are a number of way to do this from the shell and on PDKSH, they are completely broken. I tracked this down back in 2002 and a bug report was submitted to the developer of PDKSH. Every major Linux disribution shipped this binary in 2002, so we actually had to package and ship our own version of pdksh to make things work. Redhat later switched to AT&T's ksh, because pdksh was too broken to fix for the most part. Roll forward to 2004, we ran into a really strange problem with one of the products I support(Tivoli) and worked it for 2 months, tracing calls/checking stack traces/and general debugging and in the end, it worked right back around to this bug in pdksh. The customer had installed our pdksh, but later, had replaced it with SuSE's, which at that time was still broken. A colleague of mine finally sat down, on IBM's dime mind you, and took the time to report this bug to all the major distributions, here is the one from Debian:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists
This is just one package. There are a thousand stories out there that are the same. I know we regularly submit libc patches as well because we find stuff that is borked in there.
So all in all, its not really the kernel, so much as it is the rest of the building blocks that one must use within Linux. You could use your own compiler and libraries, but then are you really using
> If there system was unstable it was probably their system design and not the OS.
I don't see why a moderator has the gust to mod this to "insightful". This is one lousy *opinion* sentence, and nothing shows any special "insight" that its author might have meant.
I certainly don't blame the author for using his free speech rights, I question the *moderator* about his/her motives for the moderation.
Anyway...
Having worked for one of the major Linux vendors for 5 years in a responsible "enterprise apps position" (I was repsonsible for a well-known database vendors apps on this Linux vendors platform, and worked at that database vendors site since 1999 - basically almost since they first first released a Linux version), I can attest to the difficulty in ensuring that such a stack (db, Linux, hardware and everything in between, like the many different drivers) works reliably not just "most of the time" but "always".
Okay, it's clear that "always" is not a realistic goal for anyone, but then at least the "enterprise level support" should be able to sort it out, especially when a large customer has an issue, and especially when those issues are not that hard to reproduce? Well turned out - and reading the old mailinglists I once created for this topic when I was still employed I see not much has changed - that that assumption (or hope?) wasn't always true. Sometimes some customers were left in the cold. Oh, and that's not just my old employer, it's true for all Linux vendors - and for others too, because sometimes the complexity is just too high. Oh no, not the complexity of the one case in question, the complexity about managing all those little and larger many problems that show up on ones desk every single day, leaving no time to spend too much time on any one of them... so yes, proprietary vendors have an advantage, since there's simply MUCH less hardware, drivers, software combinations.
Anyway, to come back to my point, as a real insider (my claim, at least I *was* one, not any more since 2004) when seeing this story immediately I understood their position because I had seen it before, frustrated not to be able to help such customers (who used my old employers Linux). Even today I see mailinglist messages from (paying) customers with kernel crashes, and NO ONE is able (or tries?) to help them. (Of course, they opened support tickets with the database and the Linux vendor and didn't try to use the mailinglist as "enterprice level support hotline", it's just they never got anywhere).
So sure, when it works it's great to have Linux, but please leave those customers who decide they've had enough because in THEIR case it didn't work alone and don't try to be a smarta... and repeat stupid sentences like the one quoted above without knowing ANYTHING about the specific case.
Thanks.
"Which Linux doesn't. Linux is just an OS."
No, Linux is a Kernel. Debian is an OS, and has plenty of System Design.
'Slick, well organised presentation rooms are an important issue when selling to enterprises. Hell, so is coffee and biscuits delivered to the room every couple of hours on a full day visit, instead of walking your visitors to the vending machine :)'
..
I believe you that RedHat made a presentation to an enterprise sized company using a cardboard prop and then marched the visitors to the vending machine for the coffee and biscuits break. I bet they even used pre-owned broken biscuits.
Content is more important then presentation. I worked for a Fortune 500 company that provided consultancy services to top companies. They had standerdised on Win2003 and were for ever restoring broken Exchange profiles and rebooting the FAX server, which used to go down on the weekend. A Fortune 500 company that can't receive faxes ?? The sum total of their expertise being a Macro that generated unique file names based on initials+dept-code+project-no. Eg CG.GR.VF.ppt. GR being the graphics dept. I forgot to tell you all their reports were in PowerPoint. Actually a consultant is someone who predicts what happened last year.
''I was trying to sell a bank on Linux, and my boss was a typical head of IT type - he's used to being woo'd by the vendors... Tickets to sporting events, slick presentations''
He sounds like the typical non-techie manager, if you don't mind me saying so. Who in his right mind would decide IT policy based on 'slick presentation' and bribery. You would find out who else was using the technology and could you see a working example.
''There's also a lot to be said for having the media on a disc should you need to quickly build a machine''
Are you seriously telling us you gave RedHat £300K and they didn't even give you the media?
''there just isn't a Linux vendor who can play in the enterprise space in the way that these people are used to being treated''
Alllow me to describe how the average company is treated. I once worked for a company that sold a CAD system based around Windows and a third party CAD design, to be used in kitchen design. The software would freeze at rendering a view. Microsoft said talk to the CAD company, the CAD company said it's a Microsoft problem. End results, loss of the contract and end of our attempt to get into the small office business. Contrast that with this. A while back I emailed the lead developer on mpeg4ip and you know what, I actually got a response.
was Re:Redhat cardboard ©
davecb5620@gmail.com
I support 300 servers for a large financial institution. The cost of any one of them being down is up to $500,000/hour. AIX is our solution of choice. I love Linux and use it exclusively at home, but Linux simply isn't ready for this level of responsibility-- yet. We are starting to put some lesser-critical applications on Linux and we have it as an OS offering in our UNIX space, along with Solaris.
Some things that I'd like to see Linux achieve before it's really ready for prime time:
* Achieve a mature high-availability model. With the kind of uptime we require, I need a clustering solution that is very reliable and eliminates all single points of failure
* SAN support. SAN is still a relatively new (10 years or so?) technology. There are still quirks to work out and even Solaris and AIX occasionally have issues with them. It's a complicated technology. Add "Synchronous Data Replication" features and it gets more complicated.
* Drivers, Firmware, and Microcode. Because of the diverse hardware Linux runs on, I don't think enough attention has been paid here.
- John
... that could not be solved.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you are going to lecture us about the history of UNIX at least get your facts straight.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Perhaps they want to be able to dynamically toss their app couple of CPU's without downtime. Perhaps they want to dynamically toss it any number of i/o adapters dynamically without downtime. Same goes for memory. Mabye they like the virtualization features, like micro partitioning and Virtual I/O servers.
I know the article talks about stability, but there really are a lot of features on the power5 platform that simply don't exist in Linux land. Cmon, with linux we are talking about PC hardware, PC realiability, PC availability, and PC service. I don't care what high end equipment you put in it, if it can still boot DOS 6.22, it's a freaking PC.
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
Umm...for what it's worth, my department's cheques do go to Redmond. (We have another group that works with Linux.) We do have premier support, but it's nowhere near the top tier of the various premier support options. And yet...
When I call with a SEV-A, the first thing they do is verify that I or someone else will be on the case 24x7 until the issue is resolved, because that's the level of commitment that Microsoft guarantees to me. My TAM is immediately woken and gets on the line to make sure I get what I need.
After two hours and no resolution, they automatically ask if I want a ROSS (Remote On-Site Support Engineer) sent out to fix it. This is someone who as soon as I say "jump" will get on a plane and fly out here, and is a top notch support engineer for SQL Server or SMS or whatever product I'm working on.
At some point (I think it's three hours from memory), a page will automatically get sent to Steve Ballmer. No, he's not going to call me (yes, haha, insert flying chairs comment, whatever). Point is: escalation happens and they are dead serious if I say this problem is impacting my entire company. If I've been down for two hours and the determination is I need someone on site, they will find the best guy for the job and fly him to me if that's what it takes.
That's what I consider enterprise level support, and yes you pay for it. But at least I know if I pay the bucks (and remember we don't have the ultimate top tier of support) then there is a mammoth support structure working to get me back up and running and everyone on the other end of the line is acutely aware of how many senior level management people are being notified and coming back to ask questions on what I need, do we have the right people, is there some guy in England or California we need to wake up, etc.
gotta spend spend spend, 'our business is failing so we decided to spend some money', the market reaction is ... must be good.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Because if it "just works", it doesn't get talked about and loses brand recognition which is absolutely fatal. ( Remember Infomix? )
It's time people realized this and accepted the fact that COTS software will never be completely bug free, because it's not supposed to be.
As for RH, they are a commercial company, and have to comply with the above rule just like every other software supplier. The trick is to get the bug level set so that the users mention the name, and the problems they have, to their friends, but not so high that they jump ship to another supplier.
Better companies than HP have tried to kill it and it ain't dead yet!
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
You have to balance short term and long term wants. In the short term, there may be commercial solutions and it may have been a smart choice in the short-term. However, if the money was instead put into hardware that is compatible with Linux, or in a support company to solve your instability issues, it could be a much better decision. Even if it was more expensive in short-term, it'd be made up for in the long-term. If these fixes were released back into the projects, which they should be, it'd help everyone. Linux is freedom and power in numbers, why not put your money there instead? :)
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
I find it actually funny that this is even really newsworthy. I'm sure the pointy-haired bosses at Quantas figured they'd save either time, money or staffing hours dealing with one vendor. Obviously they didn't want to go with MS in their server room, but they went from one *nix to another.
s estudy_Qantas.html
If you look a little further, you'll notice that the issue was with Financial operations. A few minutes with my good friend, google, turned up some tasty bits. For example here: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/casestudies/WWW2_ca
It says, "So when Qantas, Australia's largest airline, merged their international operation with a domestic airline and found themselves wrestling information among multiple data systems, something had to be done. The existing architecture was complex, slow, costly to operate and not very reliable. The response was IRIS, the Integrated Revenue Information Solution."
Guess what platform Fujitsu (the vendor) runs IRIS on...?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
As has been stated in other threads, if you are having Linux totally hand and/or crash, then that is way outside normal. At least in my experience it is. I've been running Linux servers for a few years now in various applications with various loads, and I've NEVER had a Linux server die. Not once.
It could well be that there is something wrong with your configuration or hardware. Cause if it's anything else, it's a kernel bug that should be submitted. It will get fixed and then your problem will go away.
Linux is just a desktop OS, it just isn't ready for the server room.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
(See Subject)
( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )
Huh. I've ran Linux servers doing various things for 12 years now. I used to have stability problems around 1995-1998 that weren't hardware related. But since then I can't recall any problems that weren't related to hardware. I have root access and at least partially manage somewhere around 12 different servers doing everything from mail, Samba, Fax serving, VoIP, and backup.
So I'm puzzled when people talk about stability problems. I've seen some stability problems on my Laptop, but they're mostly related to the UI becoming unstable, or the OS getting pissed off if I pull out a PC-Card.
AccountKiller
I BM U BM but we all BM 4 IBM. You want poo you get poo. For you international language readers BM= bowel movement.
IBM is clearly using Linux to get people into UNIX, and then is trying to sell them with "but AIX is more stable/scalable" line. Of course, the notion that AIX is more stable or more scalable is pretty silly. Linux systems can be rock solid if people get the right hardware and software, and the right support.
However, although it would be nicer if IBM just went all-Linux, on balance, this relationship with IBM is probably still good for the Linux community. Companies who are prone to switching to AIX would probably also fall for similar sales pitches from Microsoft's salesdroids, and I'd rather have them switching to AIX for some of their systems (they're probably still using Linux on many others) than to switch to Vista client and Vista server.
That's your first clue. Their admin's are morons. So, the next best thing is to have IBM monitor and support the server that you don't know how to run- and never will know how to run.
AIX scout, remote dialin, vpn maint updates- all cool things that IBM can do for you. The deal is with IBM, they don't support Linux as well as AIX yet. Those are just facts. But here's the pisser- IBM will stop making AIX next year. Their will just be maint updates and a migration path to Linux. AIX will be Linux- just these Quantas folk's didn't seem to get the memo.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter. If they want to run a dying OS, it's their business. Airlines go under every month for less.
...and, sadly, it shows.
Hopefully, the open source community will re-coalesce behind OpenSolaris.
... man bites dog. || something to that effect.
(in plainspeak: This is only considered newsworthy b/c it's usually the other way 'round).
Aix do
we did that to address some stability issues we were having
I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that your stability is highly dependent on the skill and knowledge of you sysadmins. The last place I worked, most the Linux gurus were self trained. But the IBM AIX people got some seriously high quality training from IBM specialists. And some of the best technical manuals outside of an O'Reilly sales office.
Big Blue make make some piecemeal on hardware and OS licenses, but there are big bucks in services like training, support. While you can get Linux on that very same 'higher quality' hardware, you might not find 'higher quality' sysadmins to handle it (supply, meet demand.) Then there is also the old adage of computer PHBs: If it costs a lot, we need to pay the people that run it a lot. Which doesn't make sense in the real world until you consider that stability, features and cost are set in one of those engineering trade-off triangles. Far too many people get into Linux for the features and the (perceived lack of) cost without considering the high costs it takes to get stability. Pay someone enough to keep something running and it generally stays running.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
ODM is what kills me on AIX. The fact that their whole system is nothing but one huge script wrapped around a Registry for UNIX isn't my cup of tea. Its weird talking to people an having the say "oh AIX is great cause of SMIT". Well, if it wasn't so damn to run rudimentary commands on the OS you wouldn't have to worry about it!. The only think I like about smit is how easy it is to set ulimts lol. I know retarted but bare with me.
Automatic failover to another machine in a hardware failure.
You can resize filesytems while mounted.
Add hard disks while the system is booted.
Add PCI cards while the system is running.
Support partitioning the multiple CPUs into separate "machines"
disable a CPU that is malfunctioning and keep running.
Basically you never have to shut a large AIX system down.
Which is good because they take a really long time to boot (the big ones)
He sounds like the typical non-techie manager, if you don't mind me saying so. Who in his right mind would decide IT policy based on 'slick presentation' and bribery. You would find out who else was using the technology and could you see a working example.
I'm not saying that he made the decision purely on this, but when we walked out of the Cary offices, he did comment that they were complete amateurs, and it showed in all of his dealings with them from then on. The respect was gone and he didn't treat them the same way as he did Sun for example. More importantly, he didn't trust their statements or advice because he viewed them as amateurs.
Are you seriously telling us you gave RedHat £300K and they didn't even give you the media?
Yes, I really am telling you that. They didn't give us the media to RHEL 4 X86_64 (our primary platform). They didn't give us the media to RHN satellite or RHN proxy. They didn't give us the channel dumps for RHN. We had to download this and burn it all our self.
Exactly, that is why they should ditch Linsux and Open-Sores for Windows instead. Face it open-sores just has a shitty track record. Open-Sores idiots can't even program their way out of a proverbial paper bag.
The only reason why linsux is 'secure' is because you script-kiddies don't want your improperly written OS to look bad.
That's deplorable. AIX is such a dinosaur and has very little market share... indeed, it's not really even evolved that much. Notice that IBM isn't really pushing it as much as Linux?
I think Quantas needs to hire better sysadmins and engineers. I'm sure they could afford to do so.
It could well be that there is something wrong with your configuration or hardware.
How is that an excuse? Isn't an OS that can handle bad configurations or bad hardware without crashing a Good Thing(TM)? I've worked with both Linux and AIX quite a bit, and in my experience, the definition of "robust" is when the hardware or configuration can be bogus and the OS will let you know about it rather than crashing. From that standpoint, I've found AIX to be pretty robust, a good solid product, and I love the consistently designed admin command extensions (using ls, rm, mv, ch prefixes), and SMIT gets the job done well. I can't say as much about Linux, but that's probably because I haven't tried to run various RAID configurations on it and we don't have all that many in the field so I don't have enough experience with it in that regard...
"In addition to that IBM has done a relatively good job to ensure that porting applications is a breeze, especially to-from linux."
A breeze? I work at a company that develops applications that run on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. We get the Linux port done first and without fail on every release, the AIX port is the most troublesome and has the most stability issues.
If you think Linux on PC hardware can be just as stable or scalable as AIX on IBM hardware...that's just silly. I mean, you could then argue that Windows with the right hardware, software and support can be as stable as Linux, right?
Blar.
Except for hardware problems one shouldn't need some Uber guru to maintain a system, you configure them properly and they run until a hardware failure. We're currently experiencing major outages with our Redhat clustering solution and the best minds at Redhat are still stumped. That's probably why our mission critical apps still run on AIX.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
easy to configure and maintain via SMIT
And a pain in the ass to configure and maintain outside of SMIT. So, if you're an actual UNIX administrator, and not an MCSE, you're fucked. NOTHING is where you'd expect to find it in AIX.
Compared to Solaris and HP-UX, it's one of the best UNIX flavors out there
AIX is my least favourite UNIX flavour to administer, behind even Linux. Give me Solaris and HP-UX any day.
IRIX? On servers? That sounds incredibly scary (though I'm not convinced it'd be scary enough to make AIX look like an attractive alternative).
I understand that this decision by any business will cause much gnashing of teeth, hand-wringing and flailing of arms among the people who can't use a computer, but it's a community that can be safely ignored. They have taken a sensible economic decision, and they must be commended for it. Business shareholders will greatly benefit from the ditching of Windows.
Windows costs jobs. Any business person knows it. That is why businesses are eliminating Windows and closed-source solutions There, fixed it for you.
Go slit your fucking wrists fucktard, no one gives a fuck about you and your fucktarded humour. FUCKING DIE, DIE, DIE BITCH!!!!
Since you say the machines are locking up, I'm assuming it's not an application thing. I'm talking about things that cause kernel panics or worse, here. I'm also assuming the hardware is not defective, RAM is good, etc.
If I had to guess, his machine ran out of RAM, overcommitted on swap, swap thrashed until the I/O was overwhelmed, then the kernel OOM killer did its usualy stupid things and killed the wrong processes.
At least this is what I usually see in a locked up linux machine - it's not locked up, you just can't do anything. Well you can do one thing - assuming you mount ext3 '-o data=journal', you hard reboot and add RAM or fix your application logic.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Those comments ring rather hollow considering the fact that AIX doesn't have to work with "random collections of spare parts" and never has. Solaris Sparc has faced this sort of challenge in the past and it's gone down in a big ball of flames at regular intervals just as well as anything out of Redmond.
Buy crap hardware, don't actually bother to do proper capacity planning and spend accordingly, and the end thing will be going down faster and more often than a porn star.
Even "real Unix" can't make up for crap hardware and rediculously underpec'ed equipment.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Many vendors, including IBM, would be happy to sell you such a contract for a Linux based system. In fact, I'd be very surprised if Qantas didn't already had such a contract for their Linux based system.
/ it-schenk1/schenk3.html
Linux is a low end product for IBM, it is useful to get you into the *NIX family. Once there, they can upgrade you to the higher end platform, AIX.
"Most of the major differences between Linux and AIX stem from the fact that while Linux is well suited to running a interdepartmental server or even a small to medium sized Internet site, it lacks many of the features required to make it suitable for large scale systems. These issues are being addressed by Linux developers, but at the present, Linux is still best suited for less demanding tasks and really large, mission critical applications may be better served by AIX."
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library
WRONG. AIX was written for IBM's counterpart to PowerPC, the POWER technology. In fact, it runs the same instruction set and more then the old PowerPC based Macs. AIX probably never ran on the mainframe unless you get 32-64 processor pSeries machines a mainframe. IBM's pSeries machines are the largest machines that run UNIX or Linux on PC like systems. You can't buy a Intel box with more then 8 maybe 16 cores now(are there quad CPU boards that will take 4 quad core intel chips??). The top of the pSeries runs 64 processores. You can also fractionate the CPU's as low as .1 CPU per LPAR. I wouldn't go that low, but I would definitely go to .5 or even.25 CPU per LPAR.
The thing AIX definitely is is rock hard stable. I don't remember the last time we had an outage due to AIX. It was always application and possibly hardware (but very rare).
Wih Power 6, LPARS will have some capability to be moved around. I am REALLY looking forward to that!
Gorkman
Is that anything like "-froot loop" ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
At least their planes don't crash... ...yet...
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Until Linux has the power that Microsoft holds to specify compliant hardware designs, linux is going the root of the poor man's system, or the rich man's toy, and more or less, always with something broken.
Aix was designed to run on specific IBM hardware with up to 8 processors, and superior disk I/0. Linux is geared to the ubiquitus PC. Here again there are many implementation problems, so much so that I am considering giving linux up for a year or two. I have rebuilt my system about every 3 months. (Fedora Fc6 and now Fc7). But in fairness to FC7, this system is known as a beta, so it does not count. But for some reason, this beta system performs better then the version it is replacing.
Still, linux is the tail trying to wag the dog in the sense that it has to run on ever so many platforms.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"and it is maintained by one of the oldest technology companies in America"
Fallacy.
Or else, consider buying your hardware from Egypt. After all, one of the most ancient cultures still alive.
Or else, maybe bring some ancient history of IBM (WWII) while it does not matter for the discussion.
Essentially, all written above is BS.