@Phat: first off, you are receiving very good advice from RecoveryOne, so i will not interfere with that and add some general information.

@RecoveryOne: great to see a fellow AIX-guy here! I was absent for some time, so a somewhat belated welcome to this forum.

You have to understand that AIX stores a lot of configuration and customisation information in a data structure called ODM (Obect Data Manager). It is database-like and remotely similar to the registry in Windows-OSes (in fact the registry was derived from it) or what you get in Firefox when you type about:config into the address bar.

Many commands look up information there when you ask for certain configuration aspects. Also, the respective configuration commands will update the ODM to reflect the changes they do upon your bidding. It is a common problem for AIX novices to use not the "official" commands but low-level workarounds to get configuration changes done. This usually leads to a disparity between the content of the ODM and the real configuration (because the low-level commands won't update the ODM accordingly) and usually such configuration changes are lost upon reboot, because during the boot process commands are run that get their necessary information from the ODM and the changes that have been made are not reflected there. (On the other hand, though, once you know exactly what you are doing you can use this mechanism to your advantage if you *want* a certain configuration change not to survive reboot.)

Here is an example, using the configuration of an IP alias, about how to do it correctly. At first the naive way:

Code:

ifconfig <interface> alias <IP-address> netmask <netmask> up

You can fire off this command and it will do what you expect but this will not survive the next reboot: the changes are made but not stored in ODM and because during the boot only what is in ODM is configured it will not be there any more.

Some (especially people coming from other UNIX OSes) will now create some start-scripts where they run this command over and over again during each boot to make up for that. This exercise basically shows the difference between a working and a desirable solution: will this work? Yes. Will it be good that way? No! Because the information is still not in the ODM some commands, which get their information from there will still ignore this alias with all the problems this can cause.

Here is how to do it the AIX way:

The network interface is a device and there are only so many commands to deal with devices:

Code:

lsdev    list devices and their attributes
chdev    change devices and their attributes
mkdev    create devices
rmdev    delete devices

since we want to change the attributes of a network device we need [i]chdev[/icode]:

Code:

chdev -l <device> -a alias4=<IP-address>,<netmask>

This will change the device and updated the ODM at the same time, so upon reboot the new configuration will automatically be in place, without any startup script.

Bonus information: if you want to remove the alias but keep the interface you simply have to change the device again:

Code:

chdev -l <device> -a delalias4=<IP-address>,<netmask>

Notice, that only the ODM is kept up-to-date this way. You will have to i.e. edit /etc/hosts yourself still if you need to reflect the changes in there. Also notice that with the same mechanism you can also set up/delete/change/show (lasting) static routes for a certain interface.

smitty, as suggested by RecoveryOne, is just an interface to the commands i explained here. If you are unsure about any of them you should definitely use it because this way you will always get it right: instead of dealing with the command formats you can enter the information into convenient forms. Still, there is nothing you can do with smitty you couldn't do without it and it is reassuring to know that. smitty is just an interface to things that are already there.

I hope this helps.

bakunin