smitty like demo sites?

Question

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/IBM_AIX_SMIT

I'm searching for a "demo" site for learning smitty (get the used commands by F6!)

Are there any? Like there are router demo sites:

http://support.dlink.com/emulators/di604_reve/h_wizard.html
http://www.informatione.gmxhome.de/DDWRT/Standard/V23final/

Because AIX can't run in a VM :(

eh... it can. The "VM" is just called an "LPAR" (logical partition), that's all. Oh, and it runs on IBM hardware, not x86 laptops :) — Wodin, May 13 '11 at 22:32
bounty:at least can someone tell, that is there a site where I can see what are the exact commands that smitty uses? e.g.: what commands smitty tells if I press F6 — LanceBaynes, May 17 '11 at 10:52

Caleb · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-17T15:03:24.237

There doesn't seem to be a "demo" site out there. Not only is this an aging system used by only a small minority of administrators, but you are expected to understand AIX already before automating it's administration. All the resources available seem to be more advanced that you are looking for, but here are some materials to read anyway:

IBM has an article that goes over the basics of SMIT. Since SMIT is a just an administration interface to AIX in general, the other whitepapers on AIX also have relevant information as you go along.
There is an article covering SMIT in brief in Volume 10 of SysAdmin, along with a few other pieces on AIX.
The wikipedia coverage is pretty sketchy, but the IBM AIX SMIT page page has a few of the keybindings and a good summary of what you're dealing with.
As far as a list of commands goes, SMIT is just a control interface for other system commands, and you cat get some command line arguments for it in this documentation.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 17 '11 at 19:32

You can run SMIT with a -x parameter as described here:

A safer way to explore the SMIT application is by invoking it with the -x flag. When the -x flag is specified on the command line, SMIT appears to function normally, but it will not actually execute any commands. Instead, it writes to the smit.script file the commands it would have run under normal operation.

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

As far as I know there is no smitty "simulator" available. If you are an IBM partner, the Virtual Loaner Program may be something for you.

Smitty uses the same commands, that you can access from the command line. For many tasks (excluding HACMP) it is often easier to use CLI, without invoking smitty.

When you use smitty and try to take a peek at the command being called for a given task (F6), what you see is a short and ugly shell script in ksh. For non-trivial tasks rather than analyse the script I usually find it easier to just read which command is being called (e.g., mklv or ioo, or nim) and then go through appropriate man page.

Apart of resources given by Caleb there is Infocenter which is a comprehensive AIX information source. You'll find both command references and AIX redbooks there.

smitty like demo sites?

3 Answers3