8 Jan
1999
8 Jan
'99
9:13 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: Miles O'Neal <meo(a)netads.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Saturday, 9 January 1999 19:10
Subject: Re: new to the list
Ward Donald Griffiths III said...
|tools I've found from a commercial supplier -- if somebody was to
|port SMIT to Linux, my life would approach perfection.
If they did, and trie dto put it on my system, I'd have
to hurt them.
Ok, as a (currently) AIX deprived person, might I ask WTH is SMIT please?
Cheers
Geoff Roberts
Computer Room Internet Cafe
Port Pirie
South Australia.
netcafe(a)pirie.mtx.net.au
8 Jan
8 Jan
9:33 p.m.
Computer Room Internet Cafe said...
|Ok, as a (currently) AIX deprived person, might I ask WTH is SMIT please?
System Management Interface Tool.
It's a menu-driven system for system management,
which would have been OK, except IBM decided that
the usual UNIX tools and methods were too slow
and too weird, so they wrote an object database
to put under it, and by the time they were done,
it was slower than any other system management
thing available, and made AIX impossible to
administer from a UNIX standpoint, because it
was so different.
SMIT itself is pretty cool. It runs with either
a Motif interface or as a curses-based program
(text on a tty window or screen), so you can use
it anywhere. And once you figure out a few IBMisms,
it's not hard to use.
But half your UNIX commands are no longer relevant.
They might be present, but they may or may not do
what you expect. There are a whole bunch of extra
commands to manipulate the odb, some intuitive and
some not. So any time you can't use SMIT, all your
UNIX knowledge is useless.
This is true to a small extent with most variants
of UNIX (Solaris, HP/UX, Linux, whatever), but it's
a huge deal with AIX.
If I could have SMIT without the ODB, I'd love it.
-Miles
for a while there were underground IBM bumper stickers
around Austin proclaiming, "SMIT happens!"
10:20 p.m.
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9 Jan
9 Jan
2:11 a.m.
Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Miles O'Neal once stated:
I'll admit that some of the damned odb stuff is annoying (mostly
because the documentation is down to IBM standards), but between
the F4 key (I like plagiarizing when I code shell scripts) and the
Logical Volume Manager [I hear rumors of work on that for Linux, so
my hopes are up -- hell, ever since IBM joined the Apache team, I've
got no idea where the world is going -- then Intel bought into Red
Hat].
By the way, whover was making the threat to someone else, I'd love
to have an RT myself. Second best keyboard ever made.
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram@cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
WARNING: The Attorney General has determined that Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms can be hazardous to your health -- and get away with it.
But half your UNIX commands are no longer relevant.
They might be present, but they may or may not do
what you expect. There are a whole bunch of extra
commands to manipulate the odb, some intuitive and
some not. So any time you can't use SMIT, all your
UNIX knowledge is useless.
And when, exactly, is the time when you can't use SMIT?
I bet the main reason most sysadmins hate SMIT is that it makes the job
too easy and thus they are fearful for thier jobs.
Me? Hey, it leaves me with more time to hack 8-)
-spc (Would love SMIT for Linux ... ) 
2:23 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Miles O'Neal once
stated:
But half your UNIX commands are no longer relevant.
They might be present, but they may or may not do
what you expect. There are a whole bunch of extra
commands to manipulate the odb, some intuitive and
some not. So any time you can't use SMIT, all your
UNIX knowledge is useless.
And when, exactly, is the time when you can't
use SMIT?
When the ODB is corrupted to #$%Y&*
I bet the main reason most sysadmins hate SMIT is that it makes the job
too easy and thus they are fearful for thier jobs.
Agreed
Me? Hey, it leaves me with more time to hack 8-)
-spc (Would love SMIT for Linux ... )
Would love SMIT for FreeBSD (but would love the AIX Logical Volume
Manager more.
As far as SMIT... But with a better looking user interface without the
stupid running icon.
Bill
----
" ... Overall we've found FreeBSD to excel in performace, stability,
technical support, and of course price. Two years after discovering
FreeBSD, we have yet to find a reason why we switch to anything else"
3:08 a.m.
Bill Pechter wrote:
Would love SMIT for FreeBSD (but would love the AIX
Logical Volume
Manager more.
By all godz I could use it on this thing (my main home workstation, I
made a couple of bad decisions when I added the 8.4Gb drive).
As far as SMIT... But with a better looking user
interface without the
stupid running icon.
Ah, the OJ. (The term was in use before the white Bronco incident --
apparently the guy was known as a runner? I'm not a football fan).
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram@cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
WARNING: The Attorney General has determined that Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms can be hazardous to your health -- and get away with it.
4:34 a.m.
Bill Pechter wrote:
Yup... know he'll do ginsu commercials.
Was that a case of programmer cute or did some mamanger spec the running
man icon or was it an internationalization... Instead of running
we'll use a world wide recognizable symbol?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Bill
Would love SMIT for FreeBSD (but would love the
AIX Logical Volume
Manager more.
By all godz I could use it on this thing (my main home workstation, I
made a couple of bad decisions when I added the 8.4Gb drive).
As far as SMIT... But with a better looking user
interface without the
stupid running icon.
Ah, the OJ. (The term was in use before the white Bronco incident --
apparently the guy was known as a runner? I'm not a football fan).
8:38 a.m.
Bill Pechter said...
|
|Was that a case of programmer cute or did some mamanger spec the running
|man icon or was it an internationalization... Instead of running
|we'll use a world wide recognizable symbol?
I had the distinct impression that it was something
somebody just did, and someone liked it, and it took
off. Management may have wanted something, and this
fit the bill, or a crucial series of someones may
have just gone, "Oh. Cool. OK." (I think that is
what happened.)
Believe it or not, in the early 90s, that wasn't too
unusual at IBM, at least in Austin. Among other
things, that's where AIX on CD instead of tape came
from, where support for xdm and the font server and
in fact almost all the standard X apps came from.
CMVC grew out of an in-house project. It was a
pretty awesome time to be at IBM. Most of the folks
had even started treating contractors like people.
[I was a contractor. xdm and the font server were
unsupported, but the guy responsible for them worked
on them like they were. I convinced my manager that
they were important, we added serious testing to the
Product Verification Test suite, and next thing we
knew, IBM realized they weren't an albatross, but a
feature!]
The original running man was *extremely* slow, and
ate up a lot of the CPU. He also fell down a lot.
And was often wrong about whether he should be falling
down or showing off his muscles. Of course, this was
well before it was even Alpha code...
(Hey, this was 1992! Can we talk about this here???)
-Miles
8:40 a.m.
(Hey, this was 1992! Can we talk about this here???)
As you've probably noticed, the "ten year" rule is often bent. If the
topic
is good enough, bending it is permitted/encouraged.
I just changed the Welcome file which gets sent out to new members (the main
difference is that the "This list is going away!" notice at the beginning
went away). It doesn't actually encourage people to bend the "ten year"
rule, but it does list some circumstances where it might be bent. It's an
implicit encouragement. (Basically, topics are so wide-ranging that you
could say the list has a double standard.)
Did you get the new file?
-- Derek
9 a.m.
D. Peschel said...
|
|As you've probably noticed, the "ten year" rule is often bent. If the
topic
|is good enough, bending it is permitted/encouraged.
I meant to add a smiley face... [1] Sorry! I'd
gotten the impression it was OK, as long as it
didn't get too carried away.
|Did you get the new file?
Yes, thanks.
-Miles
[1] 8^) [2]
[2] This smiley face is well over 10 years old.
7:15 a.m.
Bill Pechter said...
|
|As far as SMIT... But with a better looking user interface without the
|stupid running icon.
I would tell y'all a story about the running icon,
but the icon (and the story) aren't 10 years old
yet...
7:10 a.m.
Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner said...
|
| And when, exactly, is the time when you can't use SMIT?
Any time you want to automate something.
Any time you wnat to log in and run a single
command in 3 seconds and get out.
-Miles
10 Jan
10 Jan
2:23 p.m.
At 06:43 PM 09-01-99 +1030, Computer Room Internet Cafe wrote:
Ok, as a (currently) AIX deprived person, might I ask
WTH is SMIT please?
SMIT = System Management Integration Tool
Basically a menu based system to do Unix sysadmin type things without
editing the usual Unix files. First major problem for any new AIX sysadmin
who had Unix experience - DO NOT EDIT THE FILES - you _must_ use SMIT. If
you edit the files things work until the next reboot when most
configuration files get recreated out of the ODM (Object Data something
mumble).
I'm sure if you moved from a mainframe world to AIX you'd find SMIT useful,
I just found it a hindrance to getting things done - you had to turn off
your Unix brain to manage AIX.
Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)latrobe.edu.au
Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479 1999
La Trobe University | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
Melbourne Australia 3083 | air, the sky would be painted green"
3:36 p.m.
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11 Jan
11 Jan
12:36 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Huw Davies once
stated:
There's some misinformation on admin here.
vipw an abomination. Nah. It just locks the password file so no one else
can change it while you do the edit and pulls the password file info
and shadow info from the password hashed database (for faster access)
into the flat text file you can edit.
vipw also will use whatever your editor variable is, not just vi.
Boy... that's nothing new. vipw's been around for over 10 years now
and it existed in many SysV varients as well as Berkeley Unix systems.
With straight flat password files, two sysadmins can both make changes
at the same time and the last one to write the file is the person
who's changes take effect. Not too predictable on a large site.
I like the SysV init and multiple runstates and the SVR4
rc.d style rc scripts -- most of the rest is an overly complex kludge
with too much old code still in place. SysV still would have
14 character file limits and the lousy S5fs if it wasn't for BSD.
You can see what I'm running here...
uname -a FreeBSD pechter.ddns.org 3.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 3.0-CUR i386 i386
Bill
At 06:43 PM 09-01-99 +1030, Computer Room Internet Cafe wrote:
The only Unix-like system around anymore that allows you to hand edit all
the files is Linux. BSD? Forget editing the password file directly---you
have to use some abomination called `vipw' for that. I'm not sure if there
are any other files with special editing commands; I dropped BSD (and BSD
derived systems) ASAP (can't stand BSD). HP-UX also required special
commands to edit files (although it has SAM, similar to SMIT). Ok, as a (currently) AIX deprived person, might I
ask WTH is SMIT please?
SMIT = System Management Integration Tool
Basically a menu based system to do Unix sysadmin type things without
editing the usual Unix files. 
3:45 p.m.
Bill Pechter <pechter(a)monmouth.com> wrote:
With straight flat password files, two sysadmins can
both make changes
at the same time and the last one to write the file is the person
who's changes take effect. Not too predictable on a large site.
The BIG problem that inspired password file locking wasn't the two
sysadmin problem, it was that any random user could run 'passwd' at any
time to change their own password, and if the sysadmin was editing the
file at the time...
So password locking had to be built into 'passwd', and a way for the
sysadmin to lock the file during editing also had to be provided.
12:40 a.m.
At 06:43 PM 09-01-99 +1030, Computer Room Internet
Cafe wrote:
Most of the commands from smit are callable by script.
You can actually:
1. edit the files manually and update the ODM database by command
2. configure AIX v3.x to use only the files and not the ODM.
--Bill
" ... Overall we've found FreeBSD to excel in performace, stability,
technical support, and of course price. Two years after discovering
FreeBSD, we have yet to find a reason why we switch to anything else"
-David Filo, Yahoo!
Ok, as a (currently) AIX deprived person, might I
ask WTH is SMIT please?
SMIT = System Management Integration Tool
Basically a menu based system to do Unix sysadmin type things without
editing the usual Unix files. First major problem for any new AIX sysadmin
who had Unix experience - DO NOT EDIT THE FILES - you _must_ use SMIT. If
you edit the files things work until the next reboot when most
configuration files get recreated out of the ODM (Object Data something
mumble).
9330
days inactive
9332
days old
16 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
dpeschel＠u.washington.edu -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
gram＠cnct.com -
H.Davies＠latrobe.edu.au -
meo＠netads.com -
netcafe＠pirie.mtx.net.au -
pechter＠monmouth.com -
spc＠armigeron.com