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From: Miles O'Neal <meo_at_netads.com>
Date: Sat Jan 9 02:33:24 1999

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!"
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 02:33:24 GMT