AIX

Hello to all,
Goal: Efficiently allow for mass deployment of AIX to PSeries hardware.
Problems: Numerous, too many to list here.

Now for a rather lengthy expansion...
Let me just go ahead and say that I am desperately and humbly asking for as much experienced assistance as I can get. If anything sounds like I am frustrated, angry, or not in the best of moods then please understand that I have been fighting for a month now over a very simple problem, setting NIM up to efficiently manage deployment to our small crop of pseries (150-45p) boxes with NIM being run on one of our JS20 IBM Blades. Please excuse and ignore any foolishness as my intent is to find solutions, not create problems.

I will keep this short, so please prompt for more information and please please have patience as there are many things that AIX simply just does not agree with me on and is not intuitive. I am clueless for the most part on AIX and feel like I have never seen a UNIX box before (HP, Solaris, and the ever changing world of Linux are what I have experience in).

Work Goal: Ability to efficiently manage deployment of AIX 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 including managing specific configuration into classes or groups.

As you can see, NIM, JS20, etc are not really my goal. AIX is not my goal. My area has a need for this functionality, but only for testing. We will not run real services or data on these at all. Note that I may have been led astray, but the JS20's apparently do NOT run anything but the 5.2 series, and that requiring at least ML4. My username is appropriate here, because AIX is a means to an end and delays merely are delays in my real work being performed.

I have had tremendous problems with:
- getting things to work correctly
- quickly finding appropriate documentation that is accurate, complete and current
- sifting through the various doc's inconsisentencies to find the right combination
- finding context specific documentation and guides to save valuable time and sanity

I have upgraded the JS20 to the latest available firmware.

I have not yet upgraded the PSeries to the latest firmware, as I have not had time to jump into that yet. My time has been spent trying the hoard of incorrect instructions I have found on various places on the net. Searching for JS20, AIX, NIM, and any combination thereof seems to generate multi-day research projects just to perhaps find mention of what I am looking for, but no solution yet (again, its been a month of trial-and-error).

If someone with real practical knowledge of how to setup the JS20 correctly with NIM for 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 on the PSeries clients then please accept my honest and humble plead for help. I am at a point now that I need to start over from scratch because I do not trust ANY of the information I have gathered thus far.

I need hand holding, like a guide that is SPECIFIC to the hardware so that no assumed knowledge or "known issues that are not conveniently published or updated in docs as errata" slip by. "It just works" is what I would like to say about this whole affair if that is possible.

Problems have ranged from actually updating the firmware to just having a stable environment.(took 2 weeks due to bad documentation and information I recieved not to mention a very poor system of updating: requiring linux to be installed first, then all the extra packages, then update, then trial-and-error/troubleshoot issues until you find what the problem is and ignore the incorrect instructions and verification commands.)

I don't know where to begin with all the problems I am having. Each problem requires such copious amounts of time to be taken in research and trial-and-error attempts, and each of those problems usually spawns off many more problems that must be researched.

I simply want NIM setup, nothing fancy. I will need to programmatically access NIM commands remotely (ssh or even rsh will do nicely) and specify what version and optionally what configuration to load and run on which box... automated deployment in other words.

My latest problem was that I could not find the bos.up package on the 5.3 CD's we have. I found the bos.mp just fine but when creating the "lpp source" it complained about missing the bos.up file. Shouldn't the system be smart enough to either know where to look, know when it really does not need that file, or help me out? After all, I am using official 5.3 CD's with nothing fancy or goofy about them that I am aware of.

Attempting to update my 5.2ML4 JS20 (the intended NIM Master) to ML 6 resulted in so much breakage that tomorrow I will re-install the OS.

I would thus like to start over from scratch and DO IT RIGHT.

Please point me to the CORRECT documentation that will not leave me in the dark. This being the year 2005, I find it unacceptable for documentation not to be correctly indexed and contain accurate and unbroken references (links work great). In other words, if I am reading along and there is ANY sort of caveat based on hardware, optional packages... ANYTHING, then I expect a link to what these caveats are. Even better, if many exist then it seems wise to me to provide a seperate document detailing how to perform all of those modified tasks.

In my case... JS20 means what OS? What special settings must I perform to get a headless server such as said JS20 to allow for user friendly administration of the tasks to allow me to run NIM functions? WSM would be great if it worked, but I keep seeing constant failure in each attempt. If I click on "create resources" and nothing tells me of special instructions, (it should do it for me, however) and then fails that is a BIG problem. Complaining about missing files that the official installation media did not provide seems rather silly to me. Everything seems half done, or am I just not using the correct tools?

Please show me precisely where to look. I can not stress how hard I have worked on this, so please do accuse me of being lazy... that is farthest thing from the truth possible.

Again, please help. Specific instructions/guides are fantastic, but at least where to look would suffice.

Thank you