AIX to AIX File Sharing

Hello All,

In my office their are two AIX servers and I want to establish file sharing between these two servers.

Kindly help me in this regard ASAP.

Regards,
Adnan Wahid

To do what exactly? The simplest would be an NFS link between the two servers, but it depends on what you want to achieve!

have you tried exportfs command?

simple file sharing is required.

---------- Post updated at 01:40 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:39 PM ----------

Nope I did't use it

You have several options:

1) NFS

You have to start the NFS subsystem first if it is not already started. Then create an exported directory (you might want to make this a separate file system) on one of the two machines and mount this on the other. Files in there can be accessed by both systems. You seem to be not all too knowledgeabe about systems administration (no offense, but you come across like this), so you best do it via SMIT, which is menu driven all the way.

Advantage: true file sharing and easy to implement (~5 min).
Disadvantage: NFS can effectively hang a system if the network connection breaks and NFS has some really ong timeouts, which is why it is usually not used in production environments as a permanent solution. Some problems with NFS can only be solved by a reboot.

2) FTP (or some securified variant of it)

You just have to start the FTP (or SFTP) subsystem if it is not already started. FTP is not file sharing but file transfer. You copy files from one system to another in order to synchronize its contents. You might want to automate this process and put it in crontab.

Advantage: very reliable and stable. Even if the network breaks for a while there is nothing to do to clean up. No setup at all (for FTP itself).

Disadvantage: FTP is a bit clumsy and you may need to do some scripting to implement this effectively - depending on what exactly you need and what your environment looks like this can range from very little effort to a full-bown project. Another disadvantage is that FTP transfers passwords over the network in clear text, so they could be sniffed. This is why SFTP (Securified FTP) is recommended instead most of the times.

3) RCP or its securified variant SCP or rsync

This is similar to FTP but with a much more "intelligent" client. You will probably need less scripting to implement this effectively. Again, the securified variant SCP is under most circumstances preferable. rsync as well as scp are using ssh as authentication mechanism.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Agree with bakunin, for NFS method:
1) Put all target client's hostname in source server by vi/etc/hosts
2) smitty nfs>NFS>Add a directory to exports list
for example
:: path > /tmp
:: export 'now'
:: security 'sys'
:: mode 'read-only'
:: hosts allowed root access (client's hostname)
3) lssrc -a | grep nfs
4) startsrc -s rpc.mountd (if the daemon is in inoperative mode)
5) startsrc -s nfsd (if the daemons is in inoperative mode)
6) lssrc -a | grep nfs
7) on client's server mount<source hostname>:/tmp /mnt
8) df -g /mnt (to verify NFS is mounted)
9) make sure to unmount by typing umount /mnt