Objectives

This course is the follow on to the course AIX administration 1 - foundation skills. It teaches the advanced skills and techniques used by today's AIX Administrator. The course also covers problem determination and performance analysis.

On successful completion of this course, attendees will be able to:

• use and query the ODM
• understand the boot process in depth
• identify and resolve boot problems
• boot from external media to recover a system that cannot boot
• compare and contrast ODM LVM data vs VGDA,LVCB data
• explain why quorum is used, and disable it when required
• mirror VGs and LVs
• replace faulty disks and restore the data on them
• trace hardware and software problems with syslogd and errdemon
• create your own error login
• create and use dump devices
• perform basic performance analysis.

Main topics

• Administration recap

Using lspv, lsvg, lslv to gather LVM information; using lsdev and lsattr to gather hardware information; understanding your system configuration.

• Coping with the ODM

Why the ODM?; ODM internals; querying the ODM hardware and software databases; changing the ODM.

• The boot process

From power on to logon; the contents of the BLV; the 3 stages of rc.boot. /etc/inittab; boot messages.

• Resolving boot problems

Reading LED/HMC error codes; is it hardware or software; how to boot from CD/NIM; rebuilding the blv; rebuilding filesystems; editing configuration files from CD.

• The LVM in detail

Importing and exporting volume groups; where LVM data is kept; using exportvg and importvg to rebuild corrupt LVM data; how quorum works; mirroring rootvg.

• Replacing disks and recovering data

Failing disks vs failed disk; recreating mirrored disks; recreating failed disks; recreating failed volume groups.

• More on saving and restoring VGS

Recap on mksysb; understanding /image.data and /bosinst.data; shrinking PPs and jfs filesystems; cloning and alternate rootvg disk installs.

• Error logging

Traditional syslog vs AIX errdemon; how to use both; the template database; proactive logging rather than reactive; using alog.

• System monitoring

Using ps, sar, vmstat and iostat; using svmon, filemon, tprof; system tuning methods; the scheduler; the memory manager; the I/O subsystem.