Remains of the AIX team at IBM?
Posted by yaceornace@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 81 comments
I imagine it’s down to four people in adjoining cubes in an otherwise empty room like Severance. Except the room is huge and unlit except for the immediate area around the cubes.
Every month or so the power shuts off without warning and one of them has to grab the flashlight and go remind the management that they’re still there.
yeti-rex@reddit
Don't call it AIX if they are around. One of my team members will go off how it's not been AIX in forever.
It's been IBM i since 2009.
Zenkin@reddit
AIX and IBM i are not the same thing. I can half-ass manage an AIX system (doing it now) because it's basically another flavor of Linux. It's much more "general use" type of OS where you can easily do normal server things.
IBM i is an entirely different world, kind of a sub-branch of mainframes which tend to be used for very specific applications and high performance databases. I cannot manage this, even if I wanted to, without specialized training. It's still capable of performing normal server tasks, but it's wildly different in configuration and management.
They're both licensed and maintained by IBM, but then there are also real mainframes from them on platforms like z/OS which are also a different beast that IBM i guys would really struggle with. It's a crazy ecosystem, and I don't even know enough about z/OS to start getting into the differences.
TheDevauto@reddit
Its so funny how things change. I was a unix admin for years and liked both aix and solaris for different things. At the time Linux got a pat on the head and whispers about how it would never be anything (microsoft sales guys mostly).
Today instead of saying aix is a flavor of unix, people think of it as a flavor of linux. All good tho, *nix is winning.
sithinthebeats@reddit
I've worked on a bunch of Unix flavors Solaris on SPARC and x86, HP-UX on the PA-RISC and Itanium. AIX on RS6000 and Power. No SGI or DEC though.
TheDevauto@reddit
Same. Irix and DEC too, along with some others.
sithinthebeats@reddit
I forgot SCO.. we were a big SCO shop with like 3000+ boxes running some proprietary hardware with proprietary code written in house that no one wanted to touch because it was a cash generator and 'paid for'.
All the proprietary junk was held together with bailing wire and chewing gum and we would 'loose' 20-50 boxes a week.
Although it was incredibly redundant. BUT we had a dedicated person to work on this platform. No one could tell whether it was the jank code or jank hardware causing the problems.
Eventually the workload was migrated to Linux but from the people I knew that still worked there it took like 10+ years.
JimiJohhnySRV@reddit
You nailed the timeline. Long live *nix!
Zenkin@reddit
Yeah, I think that's just the difference from computers starting off as a "business thing" and eventually becoming general use. The Unix platforms tend to be closed source and difficult to learn (and it's the primary reason I didn't run towards IBM i when I was at a company that ran those) whereas Linux can largely be self-driven. Not to mention you don't need to pay for the privilege of using it!
I'm sure I'm ruffling feathers by mixing Linux and Unix so casually, but I'll leave that clarification to people who can better articulate the differences.
I_turned_it_off@reddit
now here was me thinkgin that AIX was IBM's Unix flavour, rather than being a Linux distribution
Zenkin@reddit
That is correct, it is IBM's version of Unix. But for idiots like me the difference between that and Linux is mostly just down to the shell type and understanding that smitty will get you 95% of where you need to be to keep things from falling over.
TheDevauto@reddit
There are a lot more differences than that. I would say the shells are closer than much of the rest of the internals. IBM has supported open source for years tho so likely has a lot in it.
Disk handling, process handling, permissions, tuning are or were drastically different.
sithinthebeats@reddit
Someone's faster than me at typing this!!
IBM I and AIX are not the same thing.
Ssakaa@reddit
You sound like a good boss. A good sense of humor goes a long way.
glueall215@reddit
He’s wrong IBM i and AIX are two different operating systems.
cohortq@reddit
I never knew they rebranded the AS/400 OS. But I guess it's been that long since I've had to experience it.
rootsquasher@reddit
Where I work, we have a Power server running IBM i, but many employees still refer to it as “the AS/400 mainframe.” 🤷
glueall215@reddit
Look at you rubbing it in, where in my environment we have both.
cohortq@reddit
lol. It's been decades since I had to experience AS/400, AIX, and CICS on a mainframe. I really like the team I was with back then. But it was a huge department. Now I feel like companies only have the budget for 10 guys to do it all.
ultimatebob@reddit
That's not quite right. The AS/400 line became Series I and RS/6000 AIX became Series P. I guess that they're all under the same POWER umbrella now, but you still can use either OS in the platform if you dislike Linux for some odd reason like your 30 year old legacy software package doesn't support it.
iondelag@reddit
Your friend is stunningly misinformed.
iPlayKeys@reddit
IBM i is what used to be called the i series (originally and more commonly know as the AS/400)
Blackstrider@reddit
AIX still makes \~$2B per yer for IBM. The room is full... just with contract writers.
archiekane@reddit
One guy, and Claude.
oldmuttsysadmin@reddit
First O laughed at that , then I cried a little.
voxadam@reddit
How do you think Watson feels?
meastd_0@reddit
Haha.... Haven't heard that name in a long time...blast from the past.
Still waiting to hear anything productive coming from a watson deployment..
Disastrous_Meal_4982@reddit
Junior writers who cheated their way through school with ChatGPT getting managed by the same people who thought it was a good idea to license performance on the mainframe systems.
malikto44@reddit
SMIT happens. I'm expecting the 900 building has some room, completely dust covered, with an old Simplex lock on the door, with a bunch of CMVC redbooks, 8mm tapes going back to the 3.1 days, a whole bunch of Java and Linux stuff from the time of 5L, etc... a sad testament to the RETAIN/XMenu days of support.
I'm just sad that AIX went from development to maintenance only. It has a lot going for it, especially if one wants a machine architecture that is well designed and does what it needs to, without adding pointless new features.
Plus, good VM architectures are rare these days. PowerVM is excellent, and the only thing that even comes close is VMWare.
zmaniacz@reddit
No one talks enough about how IBM invented virtualization in the 80s and fumbled the ever-loving fuck out of it.
malikto44@reddit
I would probably say part of it was the antitrust case against them The only reason why we had an "open" architecture with the PC is that IBM was under the gun, and chose to allow the AT be copied by other makers. This is why the PS/2 series was created after the investigation was over, in hopes to recapture the PC market.
Another part is that people really didn't know what to do with virtualization, especially with most applications using almost all resources on a server, so people on the micro side decided to go with one server per application.
I do agree -- IBM could have done a lot more with virtualization. Heck, there were a ton of IBM technologies that they could have run with, but between the antitrust case, and other stuff being more "shiny", things changed.
I do wish IBM kept a definite foothold in businesses though. So many businesses used IBM i, or AIX for their backend... and it worked well enough. A well designed 3270 screen layout can be a lot faster and more usable than a web page full of form fields, especially with the fact that many Web guys don't bother with how the tab key goes, or adding keyboard shortcuts.
Well, I do wish IBM didn't go the way of trying to turn themselves from a big iron maker to competing with consulting companies... but that's a different digression.
zmaniacz@reddit
You're acting like the world's banking doesn't still run system i and system z
neploxo@reddit
Banking may be, but IBM continues to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to E-Commerce. Draconian, outdated licensing enforced by sales people mandating the use of a proprietary license monitoring tool that requires an investment in 3rd-party support to set up and maintain, complete failure to follow up on expired contracts or even respond to pleas for assistance. They are a corpse that doesn't know it's dead yet.
ponay95@reddit
Until some gen-Z and + engineers decide it has to be rewritten it some stupid modern trendy language with help of AI, and fuck up the entire system...
unixuser011@reddit
Or like how IBM had the chance to buy Xerox in the 50’s or had the chance to build the ARPANet in the 60’s and fumbled the ever loving fuck out of it
Ssakaa@reddit
Kinda like how FreeBSD Jails, Solaris Zones, and Virtuozzo all pretty much completely missed the market.
Electronic-Jury-3579@reddit
Smitty!
malikto44@reddit
You know you are doing things right when you see the little guy run and fall over.
SpecificExtension105@reddit
I count not going too far down the AIX AS400 route as Devine intervention, kept me from wasting all that time to end up at a dead end.
MostlyHarmless97@reddit
We finally gave it the heave ho, but I enjoyed the decade of managing P8 and P7 systems and various LPARs for iSeries DR, Oracle, Unix, etc. It was just me and one other old-head running it — we occasionally tried to sell our fellow VMware admins on why it was so cool and versatile. Not for everyone I guess.
umlcat@reddit
Speaking of old technologies like AIX, AS/400, COBOL, some customer companies invested a lot of money using them, and they are sort of too attached to them and do not want to replace them, because they will have to pay a lot of money, again.
Additionally, some of those code are too complex and is too difficult to replace without errors, the "do not touch that code" syndrome.
ponay95@reddit
They don't want to pay. But also, they don't understand why replace something that work that well.
All my IBM i customers who migrated to anything else regret it because now pays more for their solution and they have now to rely on many different providers...
A company i know needs to have 3 SAP servers with 1TB of RAM in each to run, where their 400 was an 1 cpu LPAR with 4GB of RAM. Hilarious.
mspgs2@reddit
You want sad. Big name insurance company has had a job opening for mainframe cobol dev for a good bit. I can only imagine the prior dev was found dead in their cube.
kennedye2112@reddit
I work for an extremely large retailer. We're currently "scheduled" to be off the iSeries by 2030. The migration started prior to the first iPhone release.
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
Not Costco! I love seeing the original IBM 5250 non-emulated terminals in the wild still whenever I go there.
Burgergold@reddit
Worked for IBM 2003-2015 in STG group. Was an AIX sysadmin all this time
Reading this thread makes me sad hehe
Karthanon@reddit
Worked in Boulder from 2000-2003 as an AIX admin, was great.
Wore shorts to the office, my manager DGAF as long as work got done. Ian, you were a great manager.
Burgergold@reddit
Never had a dress code in Bromont
Karthanon@reddit
We had the standard business casual - people still wore suits to the office, though. Was a weird time.
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
It is weird how suits disappeared, even at IBM, over the last 40 years. I only needed a suit for my first job...it's all been business casual ever since. I work for a tech company but can't pull off the NYC/SV hipster look so it's a basic business cssual look for me.
Horsemeatburger@reddit
Me, too, as well as feeling old.
Got into AIX when we got an RT-PC, then AIX on PS/2, then on RS/6000. People around me complained how AIX means "Ain't uniX" but I found many of the differences actually made AIX better.
It's a real shame IBM never ported AIX to the x64 architecture.
Burgergold@reddit
Well i think the p hardware had more to do than the os itself. Rhel and ubuntu are much easier. Had to maintain my own compile on many middleware thst werent available to recent on aix.
But AIX had some feature that took time to see on Linux.
yaceornace@reddit (OP)
Same. We should be shutting down our last AIX servers later this summer. They’ve been a pleasure to work with for many years. Largely funding my retirement, too.
Burgergold@reddit
Met my old.coworkers recently, most are them are retired or about the get retired (while im still in my early 40). They also shut down their mainframe (Z) cause they were able to find people to teplace people going in retirement
They moved everything on either AIX or RHEL on P and were looking if they would move to RHEL on X
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
My brother works for a credit card acquiring bank. AIX is not going anywhere...there's the core mainframe that can never be changed out and AIX is the "open systems" (with huge air quotes) layer that now does all the talking to it. Both are incredibly well supported by IBM, it might as well be SaaS and they pay dearly for it. I think there may be four Severance greybeards left in Toronto or the UK, but I guarantee everything else is over in India.
Workloads that never change and can't be removed are that mature sweet spot that just keeps money flowing in. I've seen a bunch of "get rid of the mainframe" projects over a 30 year career where the goal is to swap it with 30 pizza box Linux servers...and they may get rid of some of it but the core remains.
Draculalol@reddit
That AIX hardware was legit
SA_22C@reddit
AIX hardware is legit.
TuxTool@reddit
As an AIX admin myself, you are very wrong. The new Power11s running AIX 7.3.3 (x.x.4 is due soon) look nice but we're gonna ride the 10s out til P12.
Those Power systems are a beast!
Haunting-Prior-NaN@reddit
I supported a couple of servers back in the day. They had a nifty trick where you could seamlessly merge storage and present it as a single mount point.
Fortunately never had to recover any faile mount points, but back in the day it was quite cool.
Loan-Pickle@reddit
I used to work at IBM and kept in touch with some people there. From what I have been told is that AIX development has moved to maintenance only and all work is now done in India. IIRC it was around 2020 when they moved all the work to India.
DJzrule@reddit
I have a feeling a bunch of modern Claude powered developers are going to swoop in and start to modernize these financial and commercial AIX systems on x86 architecture and make a killing as the consultants get more expensive and slimmer, and the reality of 20-30+ year old code and telnet greenscreen interfaces become more ridiculously archaic.
Pertinax1981@reddit
I think you'd be surprised. The amount of EPIC dbs i still are on these..
zebrapenguinpanda@reddit
Pour one out for Smitty
FuckMississippi@reddit
boot to tape was the GOAT for me. saved my tail more than once.
Karthanon@reddit
Yep. Boot to tape was fucking great.
Horsemeatburger@reddit
It's some kind of amazing that in the past we had great management GUIs like AIX SMIT/SMITTY or HP-UX SAM which let you manage all aspects of a huge server via a text terminal, and in Linux the best we got was SUSE YaST (which isn't anywhere as good and now deprecated).
unixuser011@reddit
I sincerely hope that if or when they decom AIX that they port SMIT to Linux
Horsemeatburger@reddit
Seconded. Even if they just bring it to RHEL.
unixuser011@reddit
That would make RHEL worth the price of admission for me. Yea they have Ansible, but SMIT is just so much better
zebrapenguinpanda@reddit
I also miss dshell
Comfortable_Text@reddit
Nah he's still there. I had to smit users today to add a new one and then set the temp password!
doalwa@reddit
I have a Power740 machine at home running VIOS with AIX and Debian partitions. AIX is pretty fun but yeah…when Linux came on the scene, proprietary UNIX just didn’t make a lot of sense anymore unfortunately.
techie1980@reddit
AIX was one of my first real *nix's. Things like a built-in LVM that actually worked well most of the time, and a sensible network stack definitely separated it from the others.
The ODM seemed like AIX's answer to the windows registry - vaguely terrifying to manage by hand.
PSeries in general was decades ahead of everyone in terms of virtualization and truly using a hypervisor as a fundamental unit of the operating system. And then they completely fumbled the implementation using the traditional IBM mindset of "We'll make money by getting everyone to buy consulting services" and made the deployment as complicated as possible. Understanding mechanics of VIOS, VSCSI, NPIV and SEA with no options for "you're running a small, uncomplicated setup so here's a one-click vanilla setup option". The appliance mindset was totally alien until it was way too late. Even things as modest as virtualizing HMCs took DECADES of infighting, and using bash as a default shell was seen as a lost cause.
mwskibumb@reddit
My old job ran aix maybe 10-15 years ago, I honestly don’t think they have migrated off.
They were already slow moving from a tech perspective.
unixuser011@reddit
I’m honestly surprised that AIX is still around and that they haven’t fully pivoted to RHEL yet
Comfortable_Text@reddit
We still rely on our AIX server to run then whole company!
HI-McDunnough@reddit
There are certain types of industries where hundreds of companies still use AIX as their "core" system. I'm at one of them.
Comfortable_Text@reddit
I can’t until we move off of this antiquated software. September can’t come soon enough.
Regular-Nebula6386@reddit
You are describing the AS/400 team.
pdp10@reddit
Around the beginning of 1998, a junior SWE whose firm was a big embedded OS/2 user, told me that IBM only had one lady left assigned to write all graphics drivers for OS/2. They figured the writing was on the wall, and were trying to migrate to NT.
Apparently, the Power hardware VIOS LPAR is based on AIX. Linux on Power probably has no real dependencies on VIOS, but OS/400 on Power sure does. To my knowledge, VIOS acts as a necessary abstraction for OS/400 to fully use modern hardware.
zenfridge@reddit
VIOS is the virtualization layer for several hardware systems, including pSeries and i. While you can run on direct hardware, you wouldn't. Instead you leverage VIOS to virtualize one into many (which yes, is AIX with a limited shell for normal use) - to virtualize things like ethernet and disk. our SLES and RHEL (on power systems) sat on top of the VIOS for that virtualization. (we've since moved to intel for RHEL, and are migrating off AIX over the next couple years). It's not a requirement for us for RHEL/AIX to use "modern hardware" per se, although it could since it abstracts e.g. to a generic SCSI disk for example. But I definitely could see that for OS/400!!
Legitimate-Form-2916@reddit
LMAOOOO this is frying me