1) Standard - agree, budget at least 2 GB for rootvg size, generally more depending upon amount of paging space needed to support your memory config and other variables. Our site has standardized on 10 GB for rootvg for AIX 5.3 lpars and a 5 GB paging space, unless amount of memory allocated to an lpar dictates more. This may be a bit overconfigured for disk space but disk is relatively cheap nowadays, so better to have too much rather than not enough. I've visited a site where there wasn't enough space given to rootvg and so subdirectories of /var on almost every box were links to other filesystems, sometimes on other vg's and no consistency anywhere, which made it look like it was very messy to have to admin those boxes.
2) Standard - agree, we also create a /usr/local/bin directory on all servers
3) ML 04 (or latest patches at install time)
4) All patches needed by your hard-/software *** this includes putting the latest firmware on your hardware as this is often overlooked but can be critical. Modern RS6000 hardware runs very complex firmware and if you are running multiple LPAR's on a host you don't want to have to shut down all partitions a month from now to apply firmware if you could have applied the same firmware before putting any partitions on it. Read the firmware instructions very carefully as well, it could take 30-45 mins to apply the firmware. Earlier this year I badly hosed up a box by thinking something was wrong with the firmwarre update and pulled the plug in the middle of it. DOH! ***
5 - I agree with your two previous posters
I would add that gzip is very handy
some of my coworkers insist on using vim
lsof can be extremely useful
Personally I like to have lynx on the box too for easy and immediate http connectivity
OpenSSH (don't use the commercial one it's not as good) no longer requires prngd, only the OpenSSL package is a pre-requisite.
You can find many of these tools at this website:
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/aix/pr.../download.html
Registration is required to get OpenSSH and other crypto software, it's an easy-to-overlook small link at the bottom of the box on the right-hand side of the page.
I'm absolutely certain that the RPM installer is a part of the standard AIX 5.3 install, and pretty sure that gzip is installed by default as part of AIX 5.3 too (it's part of our default install for 5.3 via NIM)
Hope this helps >< bOOtnix
Aix 5.3