This is probably a really stupid question but I figured it's better to know for sure than to just assume. How does RHEL compare to AIX and Sun Solaris in terms of usability. I'm not asking which one is better, just how their usability compares.

The reason I ask is because I was looking through job openings in my area on monster.com. I did a search for linux administrator but the only comparable jobs that are available are AIX and Solaris admins.

Being a Linux admin for two years in a redhat environment (RH 7.3, 9, FC3, and CentOS 4), would I be qualified enough to apply for a positions working with AIX or Solaris? Or are those two OS's completely different that what I'm used to?

Hi

Ok, comparing the three, I have to admit that I know linux very well, AIX a little and Solaris only from hear say. (bear that in mind, when reading my evaluation)
AIX and Solaris are Unixes, basically the grandparent of linux. There have a lot in comon, but in my opinion, UNIX is old and many things that got improved for the better in linux did not benefit the unixes. That fact, that there is a lot of new blood in linux, young people (younger than 50 years old anyway) that challenge the status quo and found that program xyz is just too difficult to use and the price has made linux canibalize unix a great deal in the last years.
Now on the term of linux being superior by usage being easier, I know that many unix people will probably flame me. Go ahead, but vi just does not cut it anymore. I started with it, have used it now for about 4 years and now breaking with the status quo and trying to improve usability and efficiency switched to emacs. I believe that one has to challenge things from time to time, otherwise there is never any improvement.

On the note of stability and security I would say that AIX and Solaris are superior to linux. Many companies stick to these also because of the brand name they have, much of it deserved.
These both unixes are also commercial, linux is not really (in design and development)
Be careful when it comes to system maintenance, AIX for example has many things that are different than in linux. You should try to get a report comparing the both and showing differences (I saw one on the web sometime ago)

In my own (limited fact based) opinion, Solaris seems to be the only still alive and in development Unix. AIX seems surely less innovative than Solaris.
Solaris is from Sun, AIX is from IBM: A lot of what is in these OS is also what is in the companies, their philosophies etc...

Hope I helped you out there. I am somewhat in the same position as you, but do already some support on AIX. AIX, as much as I saw so far has some work to go into it to really master it, especially when you do also hardware upgrades and anything directly connected to system monitoring and maintenance.

cheers

Markus

Hey I really appreciate your reply. You say you've worked on AIX, so from your experience, does having 2 years of Linux admin experience qualify you for a job position supporting an AIX server. As my OP says I have experience supporting Redhat Linux servers, but all of the *nix job openings in my area are for AIX and Solaris admins. How different are the AIX/Solaris servers, when it comes to system administration?

You're welcome, this is the great thing about this forum, very smart people knowing all kinds of stuff and all of them sharing it in the Open Source spirit. And all of us get more out of it that we put in!

I did some stuff on AIX, but just application support and some scripting, fairly basic stuff. Don't know much about user management. You have to anticipate that you will not know how some things are different and go search them out.
Well, I think you should be able to close the gap between of what you know and what you need to know pretty fast:

I found the AIX faq, I thought that somewhere it even compares to linux:
(it's pretty extensive and has 5 parts)

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/aix-faq/part1/preamble.html

I thought that it is pretty good, it is the kind of "if you come from Mars, this is what you need to know about Earth" faq.

and some more useful stuff (a comparison):
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?s...1&tid=2&tid=10

(comparing lots of unixes and linux and bsd and some stuff more)
http://www.unixguide.net/unixguide.shtml

cheers

Markus

Why not figuring out by yourself how Solaris looks like and compares to Linux in term of administration ?

Solaris is free (from version 10 onward), open source (OpenSolaris.org), and installs on most PC H/W.

Unfortunately, you can't do it with AIX, as it is closed source proprietary, and requires expensive hardware to run.

Hey i didn't know that. I'll download and install it as soon as I get home tonight. Thanks for the info. Again thanks again browny_amiga, I'll have to check out those links as well.

For an alternate perspective, I've been a Solaris admin for maybe 10 years or so, and was running RedHat a few years ago at home.

There are a number of similarities, and if you are good at finding out how to do stuff by yourself (via Google, books, looking at /usr/bin and reading man pages), then Solaris should not be a major problem. The boot sequence is somewhat different, and a number of utilities will be different, especially the options for most utilities, but otherwise a lot of it looks pretty familiar.

We have mostly Solaris boxes at work, but we're moving onto SuSE, so I'm going the opposite direction from you. Many people are not big vi fans, but emacs has been available for most *nix platforms for eons. However, in an emergency, you may not have access to emacs, so it's really good to know vi at least to some degree. Be aware that most Linuxes actually use vim, so there will be some limitations in what you can do, or you may need to use somewhat different techniques than you might be used to.

For the most part, it shouldn't be too bad, but you'll want to look before you type, to verify that the command you're about to use exists, that the files you're going to modify are where you think, and that the options you're about to use will do what you think.

I have an older copy of the Unix Administrator's Handbook that gave descriptions of commonly used utilities and comparisons of how different flavors of Unix varied. There may be a newer edition of this that may also compare with better-known Linux flavors.

Hope this helps.

Well about vi:

I heard the line about emergency situations a million times. But I personally believe that we will move away from these minimalistic systems. No more floppy boots and if a tool or system requires to boot from floppy, I boycot it simply. We got now CD burners, even DVD burners for years and no need to use these nasty little suckers anymore. I got no floppy drive on all 8 systems I got at home and am glad.
So when you got a CD, rescue CD to say, you can easily get some tools aboard and emacs I love so much because it got a MENU (big invention) that lets you use it intuitively (meaning: with no extensive prior several week training to use editing functions of VI) and it will use X if it can, but otherwise use only console text.
Sometime, you gotta move on and move with the times, there is constant improvement.
VI scared many users away from linux/unix. I remember meeting it several years before starting to learn linux and it scared the hell out of me.
Command console, ok, but vi sucks.

Why? Well, the classification goes like this for me:
If you enter a program, if you can't figure it out, you GOT TO HAVE the possibility to exit it fast and painlessly.
You can't do that in vi without prior knowlegde. Show it to a newbie and he goes running. It was reason for me to throw linux in the corner and to pass judgement on it.

In other aspects there is much improvement in linux that I miss in the other Unixes. Example:
AIX... you want to use df to see disk free and get it in blocks. Great, so you use the -H option, for getting it "HUMAN READABLE" in k and Megs and gigs
AIX does not know this... and consider, it is the newest release...
Or history management.... barrghhhhh, no up and down with the cursors... well, I guess that is shell related, but AIX does not use bash as standard shell I suppose.

When I saw command complete and this history feature (which you cannot use on windows really), I revised my opinion about the command line in linux. Before I always believe that "this is over, now we are in the time of the GUI".
Well, in Linux in my opinion, it is the best of both worlds, the new and the old united.
And some things I see now are soooo cool and useful to script and automate. Tired of doing it by hand all over again?
Write a script once and it will work for you every time.

It is a sad truth that most of the "migrations" that are done to linux currently are not made from Windows (which would deserve it >;-) but from Solaris and AIX and HP-UNIX (which deserves it alright)

cheers

Markus

When i tried to install open solaris last night it told me the media had a bad sector. I'll have to re-burn the iso's tonight and give it another try.

You are confusing Linux and Gnu tools and similar freewares.
I don't know about AIX or HPUX, but Solaris certainly supports and includes most of these Gnu tools and freewares, so if you want emacs or bash, just use them on Solaris.
If you want a readable df output, use "df -k".

This is funny you point this, as the only emacs command I never learned or used is "^X/^C" (quit editor) which is certainly less intuitive than vi's ":q"

About menus, neither vi nor emacs originally had this feature, but at least one vi clone (elvis) does have them.

It really depends on your job responsibilities. I made the jump from linux to solaris(prior development experience in college on solaris really helped) after having 5 years professional linux admin experience(8 yrs just messing around with linux) and it did take me a little while to learn the way solaris does things. If I was going to hire an entry level solaris admin, I would expect them to know how to some things like debugging with truss, modify volumes, examine core files, managing services, ect. There is also a lot of new features in solaris 10 like zones, dtrace, and service management which you may need to know how to use depending on your job's enviroment. Then there are all the different ways of doing things in solaris. Take untaring a gzip'ed package in linux, you are used to tar xfvz file. Well in solaris you would do gzcat file | tar xfv -. Then there is managing 32bit and 64 bit apps in solaris. Take libraries for example, you actually have a ld.config for 32bit and 64 bit libraries instead of just one as in linux. Then there is the kernel modules and all the sun hardware but I won't get into those right now. Managing a solaris box is way different then a linux box for the most part but it isn't any harder then learning to admin linux. Already having a background in linux does make it much more easier since you can easily grasp the command line utilities. Like someone said earlier, I suggest you install solaris 10 and learn the basics then apply for an entry level solaris admin job.

Yeah you can install bash and any of the gnu tools on solaris but the problem is the diehard solaris guru's who would never let that happen. Atleast that is what I encountered doing solaris work when I first started. They would just die if they ever seen someone compiling with gcc on their solaris box I remember in my early solaris admin stages being called a linux weinie for wanting to use bash on solaris. I guess it depends on how liberal your senior admins are when you start a job.

>Yeah you can install bash and any of the gnu tools on solaris but the problem is the diehard >solaris guru's who would never let that happen. Atleast that is what I encountered doing >solaris work when I first started. They would just die if they ever seen someone compiling with >gcc on their solaris box I remember in my early solaris admin stages being called a linux >weinie for wanting to use bash on solaris. I guess it depends on how liberal your senior >admins are when you start a job.

Well, that is what I mean. If it is not really standard install and used regulary (as in normally used by admins) you will also find problems with the integration.


About the intuitiveness of VI:
Intuitiveness for me is when you can figure something out without reading a manual. Yes, emacs could also be better, but you will find out pretty fast how to activate the menu (intuitively) and then from there it is really easy, since you can see how to get out.
There is not menu in standard vi and neither do you know as beginner that you can do commands with : and which commands there are. Help is not much help neither.
What you mean is that afterwards, once you know it, vi is faster. Yes, but isn't that so with every software?

All I want to say here: all the people that use vi enforce the status-quo and do not improve the situation. Newbies entering are easily scared away by this "if you are using linux, you are using vi" thing, since they reason that this linux thing is really too complicated and old and now what they thought.
I for example hate things that are unnecessarily complicated. I do not see why an elitist attitude "nobody but me can use this" does help others use the software.
It is dangerous to reduce complexivity more than you should, of course. I am very acutely aware that this is a bad trend, of expecting everything to be intuitively and easy to use, without knowing anything. Dumbness and ignorance is not really a possibility to remain in.
But some things can be simplified and enhanced withough loosing anything at all.

For me it is always important to see the end effect, the pragmatism. Although I am an experienced Linux admin, I think that I can still see the things that used to annoy me when I was a newbie. Take parted for example... terrible tool to use, you gotta use blocks and sectors, not much way to use bytes, mbytes and such. A proprietary tool like partition magic is really not the right solution for ext2 and 3 filesystems, but as a pragmatic that cares about the prompt solution of some partition needs it is sadly the only way to go, since you might end up doing your doctorate on parted and the deep details of partition management.

Parted can resize partitions, but only to the right (not moving the partition itself)
Parted can move the partition, but not if it touches itself.
If you got part a (windows) part b (linux) and make part a smaller, so you can get some more room for linux, parted won't be able to help you at all, since move will tell you that it cannot move over itself. Partition magic will do that.
Now I applaud the effort of the people that did parted, open source work is great and usually these people do not get payed for it. Critisizing is probably not really proper, but constructive critic is probably useful, since we all want Linux to become better and it looks to me like parted is ancient and is not being developed further. It is a tool pretty impossible to use for newbies and gparted and qtparted are just nice frontend for the same tool if I am not mistaken having the same inherent limitations.

Well, having strayed from the original subject: Give this job a shot, I think you will be able to manage it. Rise to the challenge, tell them that you are the pro and analyze the requirements and learn hard and fast, at the job and at home. If you do it well, they won't even notice that you were not a real pro on solaris or AIX.
I got my first job like this, not having any experience can be a tough ship to sail into the harbour.

That used to be true several years ago, but on current Solaris releases (10 and newer), these tools are part of the Solaris distribution.
Bash is there, gcc is there, you are free to use them without asking your admin.
Of course an admin is free to remove the packages, or not to install them on the first place with a custom jumpstart, but this is less and less common.

Emacs is another story, I won't go in a vi/emacs war, but I never thought any of them is suitable for a newbie.
For them, there are "notepad like" editors available on most graphicUnix and Gnu/Linux environments.

Yeah, the vi and emacs wars.
I guess it is a matter of opinion and taste. And for this we got all this choice, so that everone can use what most like.

For me, the most important feature of emacs is the psychiatrist that is built in the help menu ;-)