• Maryland AIX Power Users Group
• San Francisco Bay Area AIX Users Group

Recent Meetings

Congratulations to Indian PowerAIX User Group for recruiting the largest number of user group members, 162 in total! Over the next several months the leader of the group Varun Sharma Product Manager - IBM Systems p, will be planning a number of local user group events including a 2007 kickoff meeting.

The Northern New Jersey Power Users Group lead by Domenic Simonetti of Essex Technology had their first meeting on January 18th, 2007. Speakers included Bob Karnila, Solutions Architect for Oracle who reviewed the highlights of Oracle 10G R2, and Stan Slivinski, IBM system p FTSS, who reviewed the latest system p and AIX offerings, plus provided a preview of p6 and AIX 5.4. The attendees all had high marks for the content of the meeting and suggested several topics for the next meeting. Their next meeting will be March 15th and will include a deep dive into virtualization and Ganglia performance monitoring.

Interview with Mike Little
Mike Little has been an active User Group Leader for the Austin and San Antonio, TX User Groups since they began. We recently had a chance to get some feedback from Mike on his perspectives on the Global PowerAIX Community and his role as a User Group Leader.

Mike is married to his high school sweetheart Coty and they have been married for 23 years. They have four great kids, two boys and two girls. Mike has worked in the computer industry for 20+ years. He has a passion for helping customers proactively manage their increasingly complex environments. Mike’s tagline is “giddyup” which explains his attitude in helping customers succeed.

Q: What are the challenges AIX users see today?
Answer:
a. Increased complexity
b. Having to support heterogeneous environments
c. Lack of hands on experience.
d. Increased pressure to keep systems available 24x7 with min downtime
e. Lack of integrated system management tools
f. No easy way to do cross platform troubleshooting
g. The need for common data collection tools

Q: How do you see the Global PowerAIX Community benefiting AIX users?
Answer:
a. Ability to share common practices and avoid common problems
b. Get to know peers with-in the community
c. Early access to new technologies
d. Ability to make positive change to hardware and software roadmaps

Q: What key attributes do you see for a UG leader?
Answer:
a. Good Communications and organization skills
b. Ability to articulate the vision of the group and able to motivate the team to achieve the group’s goals.
c. Well connected with a variety of customers within the area.

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.- info@powerAIX.org

PowerAIX Poll

January 2007 Poll Results
What Database do you primarily use?

Oracle 63%
DB2 27%
My SQL 6%
Postgre SQL 1%
Other 3%

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 poweraix.org logo and/or 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 logo and/or tagline on your email signature:

Support for using Windows Active Directory as an LDAP server
A new white paper has been created that explains how to use this new functionality.

Techniques for memory debugging
Memory errors are the bane of C and C++ programming. They can impact applications severely, and few development teams have a definite plan for their management. This article presents a comprehensive program for elimination of memory errors.

Securing the Hardware Management Console
The Hardware Management Console (HMC), which plays a central role in IBM's virtualization strategy, controls hardware, configures logical partitions, and assigns both physical and virtual devices. This article provides step-by-step instructions for things you should do during installation of HMC. It also provides optional measures you can take after installation, and some maintenance guidelines to ensure that a secure system stays secure.

Speaking UNIX 7: Holiday Shell Recipes
Speaking UNIX, Part 7: Command-line locution UNIX has a dialect all its own, and its vocabulary of commands is quite large. But you don't have to learn everything all at once. Here, discover more command-line combinations and expand your mastery of "Speaking UNIX."

AIX Upgrade Center

Current promotions/offerings:
http://www.ibm.com/products/specialo ffers/us/pseries_servers.html