December 2006
In This Issue
Greetings!

As we move into 2007, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the year and thank all of the Global PowerAIX Community members for your active participation throughout the year.

The community achieved tremendous growth in all aspects during 2006. Most importantly the growth in the number of User Groups and the meetings held has increased significantly.

Milestones

Throughout 2006, powerAIX.org Community membership has experienced on average a steady month-to-month growth rate of 89% with the number of active user groups at 23. This is a validation of the value being provided to the community and a result of your efforts to increase awareness and collaboration among the members.

In terms of visitors to the website, total monthly visits continue to grow at an average rate of 24% month to month, and monthly page views continues to grow at an average rate of 14% monthly. This demonstrates that more people are coming to the community website and are spending much more time at the site.

Geographical distribution of community members now include Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America.


User Group Successes

November 10th, 2006 marked the date of the UK PowerAIX Users Group's first meeting. Attendance was excellent with more than 40 people turning up for the day. Computacenter provided the venue and food to ensure the day was relaxed and comfortable. The first presenter was Susan Schreitmueller of the IBM Systems and Technology Group US, fresh from the AIX Technical University to talk about the Uptime initiative. Next, Nigel Griffiths from IBM UK STG team covered sizing and planning of virtual micro-partitions. Peter Nutt from IBM UK STG team followed to cover tuning and sizing for the pSeries/Oracle environment. Julian Wang from the IBM JVM team out of Canada brought in a different perspective on software running on the environment. The meeting finished off with more details of the software stack, based on a presentation by the UK User Group leader Colin Renouf, Chief Technology Office at the Technical Strategy, Group IT.

On November 9th, 2006, the Philadelphia Power Users Group lead by David E Waters, and Rob Jackard of the Advanced Technology Services Group, held their second user group meeting, which included a presentation by IBM Certified instructor, Richard Bleistein. Mr. Bleistein discussed Partition Load Manager his topics included, how is it implemented? what does it do to the systems?, and lessons learned in the field. A total of 10 members participated in the discussions from which only a few has previously looked at this p5 feature. After the meeting, several of the attendees thought it might be useful for at least some of their LPARs. The meeting was held at the ATS Group Office and a Happy Hour was scheduled after at BoneFish Restaurant.

Congratulations to both the UK PowerAIX Users Group, and the Philadelphia Power Users Group for your successful meetings and we look forward to hearing about your successes in 2007.


powerAIX.org

Forums
Register with the Global PowerAIX Community Forum
This is an opportunity to share your expertise with members and visitors by posting or answering questions on the Community forum. In addition we are looking for members to help kick off the forum topics by becoming moderators, if you’re interested please send us an email.

Contest
Best Article on "Systems Administration/Performance Tips" Contest!
(Deadline Date Extended to February 9th, 2007) Are you a Power AIX aficionado? If so, submit your best tips and techniques article for Systems Administration/Performance on the System p/AIX platform. You can win $500, and have your article appear in the April/May issue 2007 issue of IBM Systems Magazine. All entries must be received no later than February 9th, 2007 via e-mail, and may not exceed 2,300 words. You may email your entries to info@powerAIX.org. Click here for official contest rules.

New PowerAIX Community Vendor Zone to launch soon!
This is a resource for Community members to easily access information on Power/AIX based products, solutions and services offered by vendors. If you are Power/AIX vendor of products, solutions or services and would like to be included in this upcoming zone please send an email to info@powerAIX.org.

PowerAIX Poll
Each month the community has a poll to canvas vistors on topics relating to PowerAIX. Last month's poll question and results were as follows: How long have you been working with AIX-based platforms?

    1-5 years 30%
    6-10 years 32%
    11-20 years 32%
    Over 20 years 7%
Click here to take this months poll, and click here to suggest a future poll question.

Spreading the word!
A number of members asked if they can include a link to the Community on their email signatures. The answer is yes! For those members who want to help promote the Community, we encorage you to include the following tagline on your email signature:

    "Member of the Global PowerAIX Community
    Join at www.PowerAIX.org"


IBM NEWS

Kerberos authentication for AIX Version 5.3 Network File System Version 4
Find out how to use application programming interfaces (APIs) when writing your own custom Kerberos-based authentication applications. Network File System Version 4 (NFS V4), the up and coming enterprise file system, uses the Kerberos security mechanism to address privacy, authentication, and integrity requirements. In this article, you'll examine different Kerberos credential cache name formats that AIX(R) NFS V4 supports and are required for authentication purposes. You'll also look at different methods of obtaining the Kerberos credential.

System Administration Toolkit: Get the most out of bash
Ease your system administration tasks by taking advantage of key parts of the Bourne-again shell (bash) and its features. Bash is a popular alternative to the original Bourne and Korn shells. It provides an impressive range of additional functionality that includes improvements to the scripting environment, extensive aliasing techniques, and improved methods for automatically completing different commands, files, and paths.

AIX 5L service strategy and best practices
This paper explains IBM's service strategy for the AIX 5L operating systems. It provides key concepts and maintenance guidance for operating system administration.


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