Edit: Some links no longer work.
Originally posted May 5, 2015 on AIXchange
As I’ve mentioned, I follow several AIX and IBM Power Systems pros on Twitter.
Benoit Creau (@chmod666 on Twitter) is someone you should follow as well. He’s been working on a new tool called lssea that “lists information and details about PowerVM shared Ethernet adapters.” (Go here for the code, and here, here and here for some nice screenshots that will give you an idea of what to expect when you run the code on your system.)
I found it very easy to set up. After running oem_setup_env on my VIO server, followed by vi lssea, I clicked on the button marked “raw” on the github page. Then I selected everything and cut and pasted it into the lssea file on my VIO server.
Then I ran chmod u+x lssea, followed by ./lssea. It immediately showed me output listing the server on which it ran. I was also presented with my ioslevel, the version of the lssea code I’m running, and the date.
running lssea on vio1 | IBM,XXXXXXXXX | ioslevel 2.2.3.3 | 0.1c 030915
SEA : ent9
number of adapters : 2
vlans : 1 2 3 4 5
flags : THREAD LARGESEND
Again, I encourage you to check out the screenshots. It’s a quick way to determine which real adapters belong to which SEAs as well as find information about control channels, link status, speed, etc. By running it with the –b option, you’ll also get buffer information. As an added bonus, if you want to know how Benoit is getting the information that he’s displaying with lssea, it’s all there because you have access to the source code.
I love tools like this that take output with which we’re all familiar with and provide useful new functionality.