Learning AIX?

I have a new job where they will expect me to start (as a beginner) to administer using AIX, this will be for a credit card payment company.

I understand that there are many flavours of Unix of which AIX is just one.

Should I concentrate on just trying to learn AIX or is there some other Linux flavour that is more user friendly that would be a good starting place?

Can anyone recommend some virtualization prog I can run on my W8 laptop to assist me with the basics?

Thanks for any advice/pointers.

You have access to a plethora on all things related to AIX administration that you can learn

Would you consider them user friendly?....I'm from an AS400 background and the IBM literature for guidance there was useless.

Probably Google is my friend here.

You could start reading this - to give you an idea...

AIX QuickStart

To my knowlege AIX runs only on powerpc architecture...

AIX and HP-UX are very similar in that both offer true administration interface, of course AIX has almost all in smitty/smit you could administer an AIX without learning any admin command...

On your laptop unfortunately you will be with a linux clone and so for administration purpose it will not help that much... but still for learning all the user unix command and writing shell scripts AND learning vi (most important!) it is worth the effort

Good luck

Thanks vbe, this would be for a job working for Visa....all I know right now is they have mentioned AIX...though I see in another job (not the administrator one I am being interviewed for) they mention "Solid knowledge and support of RedHat and/or SuSE Linux platforms, including proficiency with Linux commands"..

I know they run a lot of IBM hardware there....I guess they run some kind of batch on the system so the admin will be charged with dealing with job failures etc...

Ideally I just wanted to get some kind of overview as to what the job might entail and read up a bit before hand on some basic commands.

This site has so much information...I will read more!

Well IBM has some blade servers that are specifically for linux OS... and vmware stuf...
Solid knowledge and support for me means having to know quite well the HW and what the OS (RH or SUSE...) support in order to install the correct drivers etc... and being able to diagnose correctly failures and knowing what to look for using adequate commands... then of course knowing where in the support to look for patches...

Not sure as to your experience with redbooks but they are not the same as the user manuals that came with the AS/400 (god I remember those). Anyway there are many topics ranging from system/hardware administration, virtualization, SAN connectivity, etc. I have a hardcopy of the certification study guide for AIX 5.3 which has helped me out a lot in the past

Thanks...I'm just searching for that as a source...its always a bit tricky knowing where to start when your a newbie to a new OS, you don't want to be wasting time looking in the wrong place. Thank god for the internet though, there seems to be an endless source of information, its just a matter of sifting the good from the bad from the ugly!

You have already been given plenty of good advice in this thread, but I thought I may be able to contribute a little more. I consider The Linux Command Line to be the best book to learn Linux from scratch. Yes, in the first pages of the book the author says that the book is very Linux-centric, but you will find tons of useful information there that also applies to other Unix-like environments, such as AIX. Believe me. And not only it is a great book, but also you can download it for free from the book's website at LinuxCommand.org. Good luck!

AIX/Linux are not that hard - but coming from an IBM i/OS400 background you will probably find it daunting in the beginning. *NIX is meant to be open, which means not only may you choose how to do something, you have to choose.

As far as human factors go - *NIX is probably poor if you have to learn from the command-line only. But as you master the CLI (command-line-interface) you will be able to do more, and do it with greater efficiency.

IMHO - as you get to the CLI level of any *NIX system you will see more similarities than differences, but those differences will be large to medium large when it comes to system administration. Other differences are missing, or different meanings for an option. Two commands I have issues with (AIX compared to other *NIX) are netstat and ifconfig . So learning Linux will help, and there is a large and growing market for administrators - separate from whether you are also administrating the virtualization of the machines.

In short: new to AIX - learn smit(ty) and use F8 (to learn the fastpath) and F6 to learn the commands. And/or after usig smit read script.script and/or smit.log to review what you have done.

It is probably easier to get a practice Linux system than a practice AIX system. Just remember - although there are many similarities AIX != Linux and v.v.

Welcome to the world of *NIX!