Doug Ruska

A typical network business scenario... Money is tight, the server farm is split 50-50 between UNIX (tm) servers and NT (tm) servers, you’re overstaffed in NT administrators and understaffed in UNIX administrators. What do you do? It’s time for a transition — one of the NT administrators becomes a UNIX system administrator.

I was the NT administrator who made that transition. At first it felt like a giant step backward. Granted, the RS/6000 machines are more powerful, and the AIX operating system is more scalable and stable, but going back to typing commands at a command prompt, and writing scripts using vi was tedious. I had stopped using command line interfaces and embraced GUIs when they appeared on windows, and never regretted my actions. Nevertheless, command line interfaces are a part of the operating system that is “new” to me, and I needed to reacquaint myself with them while continuing to be productive. Systems administrators cannot afford learning ’down time’ in our environment.

I turned to the AIX Web-based System Manager to keep me productive while I was adjusting to a new operating system. I quickly learned that I would get little help from my co-workers in using Web-based System Manager, as they preferred and almost exclusively used the command line and SMIT. However, being able to open the GUI interface and use the compartmentalized applications provided much needed assistance during this transition.

For novices, it’s much easier to open up the device application and see a hierarchical graphical relationship of physical devices, from the bus that the card or device is attached to, to the logical interface that belongs to the device. The point-and-click style of the interface allows me to make only a few mouse clicks to configure a new Ethernet card, which is much simpler than having to type ifconfig and then add an assortment of variables in order to set the card.