Edit: Twitter is still a thing. Some links no longer work.
Originally posted October 18, 2010 on AIXchange
I’ve said it before, but Twitter offers a lot of value to IT professionals. I’m finding more and more useful information and links from the people I follow.
In fact, just recently, I came across all of this information in a single morning:
First, gmon. It can now play back files.
“gmon allows you to graphically monitor several AIX 5.3TL5+, AIX6, Linux LPARs and/or [VIOS] running on POWER5, POWER6 or POWER7 servers — from a PC or laptop running Windows. gmon has a very high refresh rate [1-4 seconds] and is best used as a demonstration tool or as an educational tool to help you learn and ‘see’ how POWER virtualization works in action ‘real time.’ gmon also now has the ability to playback nmon files — up to 8 nmon files can be played back at once. This new version supports both an interactive monitoring mode (using a small agent installed on AIX, [VIOS] or Linux) and a nmon file(s) playback mode.”
Next, the ent line in vmstat and what it means, from the IBM developerWorks forums.
“In the documentation it says ent is only used if running shared processors, but it doesn’t say what it actually is telling you. I know what pc and ec mean in the stats, but what is it telling me here with ent and a link to any documentation explaining it further would be appreciated. …
“You are correct ent=NNN.N in the top line is the entitled CPU capacity of the logical partition (LPAR) and it is only shown if this is a shared CPU LPAR. This number is the guaranteed CPU time available to the LPAR. If the LPAR is uncapped, you can use more than this number (if available). If capped then its the maximum. Nothing can stop the LPAR getting this much CPU time.”
Another topic: IBM System Director plugins. Here’s an overview with a download link. I counted 11 different plugins.
Speaking of IBM Systems Director, there’s this tutorial on how to discover systems that use a mirrored (or cloned) image.
“Systems that are cloned (or use a mirrored image) and managed by IBM Systems Director must be correctly configured to ensure their successful discovery. To discover cloned systems, they must be
configured in the following ways: All cloned systems must have a unique identifier (UID). Each cloned Common-Agent managed system must have a Tivoli globally unique identifier (GUID). Any cloned system that uses Secure Shell (SSH) must have a unique Secure Shell (SSH) host key.”
Finally, I found another good article by Anthony English. Here, Anthony discusses useful commands that help you locate free disks and logical volumes on the VIOS that are available to be mapped to client LPARs.
“There are three commands:
lspv -free lets you see which disks are not mapped to a vscsi device
lslv -free shows the logical volumes which aren’t mapped
lspv -size shows all disk with their sizes in megabytes.”
Again, this was just one morning of Twitter-watching for me.
Finding what you’re looking for on Twitter can be as simple as going to twitter.com and searching on a term like AIX, but plenty of applications are also available to help you navigate this terrain. As noted, I like tweetdeck; with it I’ve set up columns that constantly search for tweets containing AIX or #AIX. Of course by doing this, I’ll occasionally be exposed to other things with the letters a-i-x, like this city in France.
Sounds like my kind of town.