Hi, I'm just starting to take over administration of an IBM RS/6000 running AIX 4.3.2.0. I was working with an outside firm today moving some printers from serial to TCP/IP connections and the person I was speaking with kept mentioning that what we were running (the OS as well as the application his company was supporting) was quite antiquated.

I found some documentation written for administering this level of AIX dated in 1998 - this leads me to believe 4.3.2.0 would have been released somewhere in 1997 - 1998. Is this a correct time frame? Also we have a system upgrade to 5.x to do at some point, does anyone know approximately when the latest 5.x level was released?

Lastly my client is happy with his system and plans to run this machine for at least a few more years - is AIX being phased out by IBM (or loosing market share in the industry) or is it really just the 4.3.2.0 that is old news? I'm enjoying working with AIX and luckily a lot of this new knowledge transfers well between flavors so at least it isn't like taking the time to learn windows 3.11 for the last company on the planet using it. (I liked DOS better than Win3.11 so I never really 'got it' maybe that’s what makes AIX fun.)

Has anyone seen any major changes between 4.3.2.0 and 5.x? (I don't know exactly which level we will be upgrading to, I have to assume the newest but that is not always the case.)

I found in another thread that AIX is doing well and should be around for quite some time, perhaps even with a large market share. This is great news considering I'm just jumping in now. However if anyone can help me out with approxiamte dates of the versions I'm dealing with that would still be great as I'm trying to get a good idea of where my machine is at vs. everything else. Hardware wise I'm sure it is way down compared to what is shipping today but it has a relativly light load of up to 20 users, not too bad.

There is a huge difference between AIX and most other flavours on UNIX (which are all pretty similar) as far as admin goes. AIX has done a lot of stuff to make it industrial strength (RAS and all that), and implemented it so you can run it like a BSD, SVR4 or POSIX box. I love the way you can change the size of filesystems "on the fly" when you run out of space. smitty is your friend!

As to the release dates for the 4.3.x versions, you could have a poke around the IBM site. I have a contact at Hursley I'll quiz about it, too.

Thanks for the information. As I read more on AIX it looks like a very good career move to add it to what I can support. The 'Industrial Strength' idea sounds quite good as it seems to leave a lot of doors open as to how the machine can be used. When I first started hearing talk of antiquity I though I was getting into something on its way out; I'm glad to hear it is indeed just the opposite of that.

I've had the priviledge of doing AIX since 1991! And it just keeps getting better.
I run Linux on my laptop and at home, mind you, but my customers use AIX cause it's bulletproof, and the support is awesome.

History of UNIX
http://www.levenez.com/unix/

My UNIX/AIX Portal
http://aix.binc.net

No joy on the version dates, alas. Sorry. But as you've found there's a *lot* of AIX out there so it's not a bad career move.

About the only thing I don't like about with AIX is that its implementation of "vi" is broken in respect of the "dot" (repeat last) command - it includes "undo" as a command which makes it very inconvenient compared to every other implementation I've used (including vim). I tried to get it "fixed" when I worked at Hursley 4 years ago, but was told "that's what POSIX says". So dumb. But they do fit the Korn shell as default, so that's nice.