Note that this assignment does NOT require teamwork and in fact you will learn more if you accomplish these tasks individually.

When you go out into the "real world" and get a job as a UNIX Systems Adminstrator you may be asked to administer UNIX-based operating systems other than Linux or Solaris. This exercise will give you a peek into how different vendors have supplemented the basic UNIX systems administration tool suite.

You are to log into three separate UNIX machines (using your Computer Science account) and attempt to find the answers to each of the questions below. Notice that the machines are in various states of configuration, so don't be surprised if, for instance, a machine or two doesn't have on-line "man" pages installed. Luckily, all three of the machines have sysadmin utilities that make systems administration a lot easier. Note that all three utilities support either a command-line curses-based interface or the preferred X Windows interface (they check the value of DISPLAY and decide which interface to use, just like many other X windows applications).

You may find portions of your ESA book helpful, since the book covers these three UNIX variants along with Linux and Solaris.

For each of the three machines, answer these questions in your journal:

1. What is the name and version number of the operating system?
2. How many processors, what type are they and what speed?
3. How much physical memory is there?
4. How many disk drives are there? How large are they?
5. How many file systems are there and how are they arranged?
6. What is the name of the Ethernet device?
7. How would you rank the usability of the sysadmin tool?
8. Explain what each of the programs does in the "Other utilities of interest" category for each machine.
9. Under AIX, explain the difference between a physical volume, a logical volume and a physical disk. What is a PP and how many free PPs are on this machine?
10. Can you figure out how to see the kernel boot messages? Is there a "dmesg" command? If not, can you find an equivalent?
11. Which of these three machines is the fastest in terms of CPU? How did you determine this?
12. What do you think the market niche is for this machine and/or operating system?

AIX - IBM Corporation

Machine name: "smitty.cs.fsu.edu"
System Admin tool: "/bin/smitty"
Other utilties of interest: top, lsvg, lsps, lslv, monitor

HP-UX - Hewlett Packard

Machine name: "hpucks.cs.fsu.edu"
System Admin tool: "/usr/sbin/sam"
Other utilties of interest: top

WARNING! I have set up "/usr/sbin/sam" to be owned by root and setuid. This means that you CAN change system parameters if you are not careful! I enabled "sam" so you can browse the system configuration. Do NOT change any system parameters. If you accidentally do so, tell me about it and I'll attempt to undo the damage. Sam won't let you run it unless it runs as root.

IRIX - Silicon Graphics

Machine name: "midas.cs.fsu.edu"
System Admin tool: "/usr/sysadm/bin/sysmgr"
Other utilties of interest: top, hinv, inst