Hi guys,

one stupid question....
Is there a way to see past actions being performed on a AIX machine?
Or to rollback some actions performed (e.g. deleting of files through command line)?

Thanks in advance

There are several ways to set up AIX to record actions. Once they are recorded, you can look back at the records to see what was done in the past.

Accounting, which is very low level and records every call (so one command might generate hundreds of lines of output). This is tricky to interpret, though.

For general purposes of finding out what people did, there are two easy ways.
1. The ~/.sh_history file records the commands typed.
2. Have a look at the script command. This allows you to record everything typed by a user and the output of the commands. You can run it from .profile so it gets kicked off transparently.

As for rolling back actions, yes there is. For actions which are reversable (e.g. changing file permissions or ownership) you can change them back (if you know what they were before). Deleting a file is not reversable - there is no undelete command. But, of course, you take regular backups so you can just restore the file from there.

Also, remember that whatever you do using "smit" is logged. Two ways :
1) have a look at /smit.log, which is the logfile, and
2) loot at /smit.script, which is the shell-script generating the same result as the actions performed using smit.

pardon me but what is this "smit"?

smit = systems management interface tool. It's a menu driven system admin tool without which AIX admin is pretty much impossible.

To start it type smit. If you are on a graphical console and want to force the ascii version then type smitty.

You can go directly to a smit panel with a fastpath. So, for example, to configure networking for the first time on a box type smit mktcpip. As has been said, one of the great things about smit is that you can view the command it is running, either from the log file or by pressing F6 in the menu. Also, smit is fast, well featured and very mature, having been a central part of AIX for well over ten years.

ic ic iainr.
BTW, what does this statement means?


only if i used smit? I dun remember using it

@DriveMeCrazy : about smit logging. Just try it ! use smit to create a user (smit users), and then remove that user. You will see two things :
1) The resulting screens when you used smit are in /smit.log. If you "vi /smit.log" you will se the image of what was on you smit screen.
2) if you look at the end of /smit.script, you will see the AIX commands which have been used to create the user, and then to remove the user. If you want to add another user, just copy-paste those lines to a shell-script.
Regards
Zorba