I don't think I can get documentation and help for AIX the way I get it for HP-UX and Sun.

We run a lot of eBay equipment here, don't have support contracts, and so I basically have to solve everything by the seat of my pants through documentation I DO have, stuff I can get online, and through friends, contacts, and postings on mesage boards.

Now, I'll admit the last time I worked on IBM was back in the pre-Internet days, but it seems that most people "running" AIX don't know anything about it. They defer all the work to PWC or IBM Global Services, or some consulting house with a bunch of former IBM employees.

Greg, you're probably a very small minority of customers who actually "KNOWS" about your AIX boxes.

It may be that IBM has all the manuals online like Sun (we got the manual set when we licensed our HP-UX for HP), but I can say I like HP's ITRC support site A LOT. We have solve a lot of problems by just reading ITRC.

I really don't like IBM's support website, mainly because I rarely get a good answer from it, when searching for DB2 answers. The DB2 documentation is horribly out of date for the equipment we're running. The Quick Beginnings for DB2 UDB only documents kernel settings for machines up to 512 meg. Our loaner V880 has 8 gig! It's not uncommon to find databases with 32 or 64 gigs of memory now. IBM isn't keeping up in the documentation department.

Funny, I haven't even NEEDED to visit the Sun website... I have made one support call on some loaner equipment, and we eventually got it fixed after about 3 tries (mainly trading dump and config files and such). When the hardware guy came out, we were a couple of fix packs behind on Solaris and OPF, so he recommended I download them from SunSolve, so I'll probably be trying that soon.

Maybe I'll post up what I think about SunSolve, too.

My two cents.

So Greg,

Are you a DB2 UDB site? We are on HP-UX and Sun Solaris, as I said before, mainly on what I call our "Garage Sale IT" systems we have.

We actually have a loaner V880 ( 4 way ) and 3910 SAN with 900 megabytes on 16 disks (with 2 hot spares, one per brick, two bricks ). So far, I'm pretty impressed.

We've been testing our application, getting about 1000 tpm on the SAN with DB2 UDB. We're getting 680 SQL Statements per second and about 200 commits per second at peak times.

Originally, the cache was working and we were getting .75 ms disk writes, but now we're getting about 2-2.5 ms disk writes because we've saturated the cache.

We need more disks (spindles) to get more throughput. The fibre channel is about 25% utilized and the 4 cpus run about 60-70%.

Not bad for two day's work, eh?

Tomorrow, we're loading the NEW application with more features (which will be slower than 1000 tpm), and testing it. Maybe I can get it tuned up in the ballpark with the old application.

Glen

I've been going through [link|http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2|http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2] and then following documentation, support, and download links from there...

I do know about the redbooks site, but much beyond that and you're ahead of me.

If you know of some newer URLS, I sure would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Glen Austin