TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) Policy Settings - Quick Overview

POLICY DOMAIN - This is a container for policy and scheduling info

*BACKRETention* is a fallback value for any files which have been backed up under the specified policy domain, but for which there is now a lack of an active policy set.

*ARCHRETention* is a fallback value for any files which have been archived under the specified policy domain, but for which there is now a lack of an active policy set.

POLICY SET - This is a set of management classes within a POLICY DOMAIN.Only the active version has any effect.  The active version is created by issuing ACTIVATE POLICYSET . After activating, you may edit the original set without affecting the active copy.

Get Rid of Deleted Open Files - Linux Quick HOWTO

Sharing a nice articles which I found on web. Hope it will be useful to you as well..

You might have this scenario; Logfiles deleted while the process is still running. That's annoying: On your Linux-Server the /var filesystem is nearly full. You remove a very large logfile that you don't need with the rm command:

myserver1# df -Ph /var

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/root-var  7.1G  7.0G  100M  99% /var

myserver1# ls -l /var/log/myapp/userlog

myserver1# rm /var/log/myapp/userlog

myserver1# df -Ph /var

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/root-var  7.1G  7.0G  100M  99% /var

But what's that? The filesystem is still full. With lsof you can see, that the logfile is still opened in write mode:

myserver1# lsof | grep var/log/myapp/userlog

myapp    25139      root   4w     REG      3,12       0    2101404 /var/log/myapp/userlog (deleted)

Run VIO Server commands as root

To Gain root access on VIO server:

Login as user padmin into VIO server and type the command,

$ oem_setup_env    

Now you will get the root credentials (without even been asked for a password).

Note: According to IBM its not recommended to work as root on VIO servers.

But, By default the ioscli commands are not available for the root user. All ioscli commands are in fact calls of /usr/ios/cli/ioscli with the command as argument. You can check this if you list the aliases of the padmin user in the VIO server

Finding MPIO path associated to vscsi adapter in AIX 5L

how to determine which MPIO path is associated to a vscsi adapter in AIX 5L M7HQW5MU96RP 

To determine which MPIO path is associated to a vscsi adapter in AIX 5L:

# lspath -F "name path_id parent connection status"

The output returns something similar to:

hdisk0 0 vscsi0 810000000000 Enabled
hdisk0 1 vscsi1 810000000000 Enabled
hdisk1 0 vscsi0 820000000000 Enabled
hdisk1 1 vscsi1 820000000000 Enabled

The first field is the hard disk.

Finding disk space used by specific user in Linux and UNIX server

To find the disk space being used by a specific user:


# find . -user user1 -type f -exec du -k {} \;


Explanation of this command:


The -user option allows you to specify that find will only report files that are owned by the specified user. 


The -type option forces find to only return the path of items of a specific type (in this case, files). this prevents du from including directories, which might be owned by one user, but contain files for many users.


Then, for each found path, the du command is executed to report the disk usage.


To get summary information, i.e the total space used by a specific user:

Finding empty directories in Linux and UNIX

How to find empty directories on Linux or UNIX Server?


Here is the very easy command to find all the empty directories on a Linxu/UNIX server:


# find dir -empty -type d -depth -print


Note: The "-empty" parameter doesn't work on AIX.

Verify NTP is working properly : Quick HOWTO

How to verify your ntp (Network Time Protocol) setup is working properly in Linux or UNIX Server?


# ntpq -c peers


remote              refid                st t when poll reach delay offset disp
==============================================================
*time1.domain.. time-a.nist.gov 1  u 38   64   377   1.16 -13.351 29.63


If you see a star (*) in the name of the time server, your time is being synchronised properly.


The third column, st is the stratum. 

Mount ISO image in AIX : Quick HOWTO

Follow the instructions below to mount an ISO image in AIX Server


Obtain the size of the image.
# du -sm server_tools.iso


Identify the nearest multiple of 128 MB that will provide enough space for the image. 
For example, if the image size is 700MB, then you will need 768MB to mount it.


# mklv -y cdlv -s n -L /dev/cdlv rootvg 768M hdisk0
If the above command fails, increase the volume size by a multiple of 128.

Disable first time password change in AIX

How to disable first time password change in AIX?


Usually in AIX, if you change the password of a user, it will prompt the user to change his password when he login first time.


To disable this first time password change in AIX Server, Clear the ADMCHG flag of the user account.


To do this,

Unmount filesystem when device is busy

When you unmount a filesystem, you may get "device is busy error" sometimes.  Using the following steps, you can unmount safely.


# umount  /testsrv1/rman
umount: /testsrv1/rman: device is busy
umount: /testsrv1/rman: device is busy


# fuser -m /testsrv1/rman
/testsrv1/rman:         31477c


# ps -eaf | grep 31477
oracle  31477 31448  0 09:52 pts/0    00:00:00 /bin/ksh

Enable cron for a locked account in Linux

In some environments, there are times when locked application/databases accounts need to run some cron jobs. In linux, by default, a locked account can not run the cron job.

We can enable this  by editing a specific setting is disabled in /etc/pam.d/crond file. 

Here is the details:

# cat /etc/pam.d/crond 

Finding BIOS version in Linux Servers

In a day to day system administrative tasks, you may need to find out BIOS version of your servers. In Linux, you can find out the BIOS version without rebooting the server. dmidecode command can be used to achieve this.


Command : dmidecode --type 0


[root@testsrv1 ~]# dmidecode --type 0
# dmidecode 2.7
SMBIOS 2.5 present.