Amen. You are right, but i think you are missing the point: first, a determined "non-expert" (to avoid words more to the point) will be able to mess up anything. As i said, when locking him out of the HMC helps, why not lock him out of any other LPAR too?

Second: this is digging into a much larger area so i'll try to keep it short. The reason that so few capable admins for AIX are there is because IBM did (and, IMHO, still does) a very bad job at educating them. If i am a Linux admin and want to hone my skills i get myself a PC for $300 and start hacking. I will perhaps make it go FUBAR a few times but all this will teach me valuable lessons and i will be all the more capable once i work on really productive systems professionally. If i am an AIX admin i do - what? Buy myself a system for ~ $20k only to find out i can't even create an LPAR because i need to shell out another $50k in various licenses for one thing or the other? This might be OK for a bank, but is beyond my financial reach.

In addition the IBM documentation once used to be exhaustive. It isn't any more. In fact it is quite incomplete, bookmarks to the documentation tend to be invalidated within hours so that you start over searching for the same pages (which sometimes are not to be found again however) and even if you find what you search for the information is oftenly incomplete and leaves many questions open.

Of course there are courses: EUR 5k for 4 days of class and what they tell you is basically: "use SMIT and you are on the safe side". I don't care how to do something, i want to understand what i do. I found out over and over again that the people holding the course knew even less than me.

As i said: by making what is the HMC today into an application as did EMC, as did IBM with their PSSP, as do many other developers of all sorts of management software. There is no reason that it has to be so complicated that it needs the "black blox" to run smoothly.

Well, i do all that on occasion, especially when the "by-the-book" methods didn't work out. And i was only so much amused when i was finally allowed to throw out everything i learned on AIX out of the window and had to learn a second, completely different set of commands to do on a VIOS the same things i do on an LPAR.

For the book by which i should do it: if it doesn't tell me what i need to know to do it right it is simply incomplete and/or badly written. Don't hold me accountable for IBM delivering bad/wrong/incomplete/misleading documentation.

Having used AIX since version 3.2 i know this process. It is just my opinion that IBM took some wrong (design) decisions and even though i cannot help it i do not have to appreciate it either. And i do not have to take Rob McNellys apologetic stance towards this without objection.

Finally, on a more philosopic point about systems design in general: if you design a system to cater to the dumbest possible administrator you are likely to get the dumbest possible system which even the smartest possible admin can't make any more intelligent.

bakunin