AIX System Administration II: Problem Determination

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Course Overview

This course is designed for system administrators with at least three months experience in AIX and with other relevant education. This course will enable delegates to enhance their system administration skills to maximise the availability of the RS/6000, determine the causes and solutions associated with system problems, create a secure system and perform advanced tasks not available through SMIT.

For students studying towards IBM AIX certification this course provides the core knowledge for exam 189 (IBM Certified Specialist: AIX Support).

Prerquisites

Delegates should be familiar with various system administration tasks. They should be able to use the basic tools and commands available to help with system administration such as, SMIT, WebSM, VSM, grep, find, mail, chmod and 1s. Delegates must be able to perform basic file manipulation and file system navigation. They must be able to define basic file system and LVM terminology and carry out basic system installation activities including the setup of printers, disks, terminals, users and software. Finally, delegates must be able to manage AIX processes. This knowledge can be gained by attending AC13GB (AIX Basics (Condensed)) and AU14GB (AIX System Administration I : Implementation).

Course Outline

RS/6000 Hardware

• RS/6000 Hardware Architecture
• Uniprocessor/Mulitprocessor Hardware
• RS/6000 SP
• Parallel Architectures

The ODM

• ODM Components and Commands
• Changing Attribute Values
• Data Managed by the ODM
• Data not Managed by the ODM
• ODM Database Files
• ODM Repositories
• Software Vital Product Data
• Predefined Devices
• Predefined Attributes (PdAt)
• Customised Devices (CuDv)
• Customised Attributes (CuAt)
• ODM Class Integration
• Additional Device Object Classes

System Initialisation

• How does an AIX system boot?
• Loading of the Boot Image
• Boot Logical Volume (hd5)
• How to fix a corrupted BLV
• Working with bootlists
• Service Processor and Boot failures
• TTY Remote Reboot
• Accessing a System that will not boot
• Booting and Working in Maintenance Mode
• Boot Problem References
• Microchannel: LED codes
• Microchannel: Boot Map
• Flashing 888
• Understanding the 103 Message
• Location Codes
• SCSI Addressing
• PCI Visual Boot Signals
• PCI LED Codes
• Getting Firmware updates from the Internet
• The rc.boot File
• Configuration Manager
• Config Rules Object Class
• Output of cfgmgr in the boot alog
• The /etc/inittab File

Disk Management Theory

• LVM Terms
• Volume Group Limits
• Mirroring Striping
• Mirroring and Striping with RAID
• Basic LVM Tasks
• LVM Data Representation
• LVM Identifiers
• LVM Data on Disk Control Blocks
• LVM O/S Data
• Contents of the VGDA
• The Logical Volume Control Block (LVCB)
• LVM interaction with the ODM and VGDA
• ODM entries for PVs, VGs and LVs
• ODM-related LVM Problems
• Fixing ODM problems
• Mirroring
• Stale Partitions
• Mirrored LVs
• Mirror Write Consistency
• Mirroring rootvg
• Mirroring Volume Groups
• VGDA Count
• Quorum
• Nonquorum Volume Groups
• Forced Varyon
• Physical Volume States

Disk Management Procedures

• Disk Replacement Techniques
• Replacing a rootvg Disk
• Total Disk Failure
• Volume Group Failure
• Total non-rootvg Failure
• Disk Replacement Failures
• Importing and Exporting a Volume Group
• Import/Export Issues

Saving and Restoring Volume Groups

• Creating a System Backup (mksysb)
• mksysb Tape Images
• Verifying the System Backup
• The mksysb bosinst.data File
• Restoring a mksysb
• Cloning Systems using mksysb Tapes
• Changing the Partition Size in rootvg
• Reducing a Filesystem in rootvg
• Alternate Disk Installation using mksysb Disk Install
• Alternate Disk rootvg Cloning
• Removing an Alternate Disk Installation
• Saving and Restoring non-rootvg Volume Groups
• The savevg/restvg Control File

Error Log and syslogd

• Error Logging Components
• Generating an Error Report
• The errpt Command
• Types of Disk Errors
• LVM Error Log Entries
• Maintaining the Error Log
• Error Notification and syslogd
• Error Notification
• The syslogd Daemon and Configuration
• Redirecting syslog messages to the Error Log
• Directing Error Log messages to syslogd

Diagnostics

• Diagnostics Overview
• The diag Command
• Working with diag
• Diagnostic Modes
• diag: using task selection
• diag Support
• Using SMS for Diagnostics

The AIX Dump Facility

• How to invoke a System Dump
• When a Dump occurs
• The sysdumpdev Command
• Methods of Starting a Dump
• Start a Dump from a TTY
• Generating Dumps with SMIT
• Dump related LED codes
• Copying a System Dump
• Crash Reboot
• Sending a Dump to IBM
• Use crash to Analyse a Dump

Performance and Workload Management

• Performance Problems
• Understand the Workload
• Critical Resource: The Four Bottlenecks
• Identify CPU-Intensive Programs
• Identify High Priority Processes
• Basic Performance Analysis
• Monitoring CPU Usage
• Monitoring Memory Usage
• Monitoring Disk I/O

Security

• Auditing Security Related Events
• How the Auditing Subsystem works
• Audit Configuration
• The audit Command
• Authentication and Access Control Lists (ACLs)
• Protecting your System
• Trojan Horse
• login.cfg: TTY Attributes
• login.cfg: Restricted Shell
• login.cfg: Customised Authentication
• Authentication Methods
• Two-key Authentication
• Base Permissions
• Access Control Lists
• ACL Commands
• The Trusted Computing Base (TCB)
• TCB Components
• Checking the Trusted Computing Base
• The sysck.cfg File
• Checking with tcbck
• Marking Files as Trusted with chtcb
• Trusted Communication Path
• Using the Secure Attention Key (SAK)
• Configuring the Secure Attention Key

AIX System Administration II: Problem Determination / AU16 (AU16GB)