11 Mar
1999
11 Mar
'99
7:02 a.m.
I have, about six feet away from me, a brand spanking
hardly used Apple
Network Server 500. Nice unit. I've managed to get AIX 4.1.4.0 on it
(provided
with the system) and CDE runs well. No cc or xlc, but
we have some
RS/6000s
here, so I built gcc on one of them and copied the
binaries over and now
I
have a Perl and a decent compiler (had to steal as
from the RS/6000s
also).
It's a 603e PPC emulating an RS/6000 (!), 132MHz,
32MB RAM. Fast sucker.
Bookstore buys this guy to handle their database system, vendor says we
don't
support it, so it goes into the server room powered
off for almost two
years
until the tech guy decides he doesn't want it
anymore and tells me I can
use
it to my heart's content if I can fix it. So I
did! :-)
Quick question: are there any AIX gurus out there? I need to upgrade this
box to 4.1.5 or some Y2K compliant version. I have a contact at IBM who
might
be able to get me the upgrade, but I was wondering if
anyone out there
has the
patches already. 4.2 is apparently right out as I
doubt IBM supports the
POWER architecture anymore, but I'd like to be pleasantly surprised.
Um. I don't claim to be an AIX guru, but... There are supposed to be
patches to make 3.2.5.0 Year 2000 compliant, but I haven't managed to
download them. However downloads for 4.anything should be readily
available.
There should be no surprise at Power PC chips emulating RS/6000 machines -
the PPC instruction set is based on that of the POWER RISC chipset used in
early RS/6000s. The last POWER RISC machines were obviously an end of line
product when we were looking to buy a new server last year - all modern
RS/6000 machines in our price range were based on PPC chips.
(Unfortunately all those in our price range had rotten floating point
benchmarks compared to the old series, so we bought a Sun instead. With
luck I get the old machines. But I digress.)
I have just looked at the one e-mail remaining from my conversation with an
IBM rep on the subject. I quote almost in full:
*********************************************
Phillip,
try this URL :-
http://service.boulder.ibm.com/aix.ww/aixfixes?HBW=no
Select APAR number and type in IX76413 in the box
they can be downloaded from there
This site behaves just like the one I tried, viz. it gives me the
message:
Fix packages for AIX 3.2.5.0 environments are not supported by this web
service. Please use the FixDist tool or contact your authorized IBM
Business Partner or IBM support center to order the fix on tape.
There is also an AIX program called fixdist that can
be run on
RS/6000s to download fixes, this can be downloaded from:-
http://service.software.ibm.com/aix.ww/downloads?HBW=no
I take it fixdist requires our rs/6000 machines to know how to get at
the internet, which ours don't at present.
Philip.
*********************************************
Hope this helps.
Philip.