AIX 4.1.4 Installation Hints

The following describes some things one may need to do after installing Almaden's base AIX 4.1.4 system from Almaden's NIM server.

Be aware that these notes were written with Almaden's NIM server in mind. We are phasing out Almaden's own NIM server and replacing it with the more powerful Softdist service. Softdist offers your choice of more-current levels of AIX as well as every program product you can imagine. See the SoftDist home page or my own Softdist notes. The concepts behind these post-installation hints still apply to a Softdist-installed image, but the details may differ.

Immediately After the Install:

Immediately after the NIM install, you should see a login prompt. Login as root, which won't have a password yet, so you may want to give it one with the passwd command.

What you should see at this point if things went ok are,

You're on the network. Your ethernet or token ring card has been configured, name service is there, and your router/gateway is defined. You can verify this if you want by pinging nim for example.
AFS is installed. You can easily verify with a df command. You should see AFS as a defined and mounted file system.

If either of these things aren't there, then something went wrong during the install. Best is to call the AIX Help line (7-2525) and get some help, but if you want to investigate it yourself, try

     alog -t bosinst -o | more

A common problem is you don't have enough disk space for what you tried to install. Either your disk is too small, or you didn't specify "New and Complete Overwrite" during the install process.

If you want an "Almaden Standard" machine, run

/local/bin/customize -standard

to get all the Almaden local customization. If you want to know more about customize, leave off the -standard option and it'll prompt you for each piece and give more detail about what it's about to do for (to) you.

The other thing you may want to look at are the sizes of your file systems and paging space. Typically, /var and /tmp need expanding, which you can do with this command

     chfs -a size=+81920 /var

for example, to increase /var by 40 MB You'll also probably find your paging space to be inadequate. It can be increased by

     chps -s'8' hd6

which will increase the default hd6 paging file system by 8 physical partitions, which is 32MB with a normal 4MB physical partition size, but with larger disks (4GB, e.g.) AIX defaults to a 8MB physical partition size, making this command increase hd6 by 64MB.

Other Program Products:

There are different program products one can install to the base AIX 4.1.4 image at /afs/alm/common/inst.images. One can find des, dps, opengl, performance aide & toolbox, pex & phigs, ultimedia, and wabi. To install one of these, follow the instructions just below.

There are also a bunch of other program products like the C compiler that came from the "Software Solutions" CD under the /afs/alm/common/inst.images/sws directory. Those have their own install procedure detailed a bit further down.
After you install the program products you want, you should apply the latest fixes to your system. To do that, follow these instructions below.

To install one of these program products in the /afs/alm/common/inst.images directory, as root,

First determine the directory that contains the .toc file. A command like
```
find /afs/alm/common/inst.images/ultimedia-4.2 -name .toc -print
```
for example will tell you the .toc is located in /afs/alm/common/inst.images/ultimedia-4.2/usr/sys/inst.images. You'll find that it's typically located in ...whatever.../usr/sys/inst.images.
smitty install_latest
For the "INPUT device / directory for software" field, enter that directory, in our example, /afs/alm/common/inst.images/ultimedia-4.2/usr/sys/inst.images.
Hit enter at the next screen to install the software.
Hit enter again at the "ARE YOU SURE?" prompt.

To install one of the program products from the "Software Solutions" CD at /afs/alm/common/inst.images/sws, like C, C Set++, FORTRAN, DB2, et cetera, as root,

export SHOWCASEPATH=/afs/alm/common/inst.images/sws
$SHOWCASEPATH/showcase/showcase

Once inside the showcase program,

Select the program product you want to install,
Hit the "Configure" button (take the /usr/... default),
When that finishes, hit the "SMIT Install" button.

For the "INPUT device / directory for software" fill-in, put

      /afs/alm/common/inst.images/sws/pppp/installp, where
        pppp = cset    if installing C Set++
               c       if installing C
               db2     if installing DB2
            or xlf     if installing FORTRAN

Printer Support and Other AIX Filesets:

Unlike AIX 3, the AIX 4 installation process only installs device drivers for the hardware it can sense during installation time. This is important to understand in two scenarios. If you install hardware after the installation, say a token ring adapter after you installed with your ethernet adapter, you won't have the right token ring device drivers. The second more common case is when you have a printer attached to your machine. There's no protocol for AIX to "sense" that there's a printer attached, much less what kind of printer it is. Therefore, you won't have any printer device drivers installed.

To install missing device drivers, invoke SoftDist (SDinit -s softdist), and install the appropriate "AIX Printer Drivers" menu item for your operating system level (check the "Description" box after you select the menu item).

Installing through SoftDist is easier than the old way of using these commands

    nimclient -o allocate -a lpp_source=lpp-414
and nimclient -o cust -a filesets=printers.ibm4029.rte (for example).

You can still use this method, but you'll have to know what the lpp_source name is for the first command and you need to know what the fileset name is for the second command. You can get the lpp_source name as root with a nimclient -l -t lpp_source command and you can refer to this list of AIX 4.1.4 fileset names (warning, it's pretty big) to find the fileset you need.

However you do it, after you install the printer device support, you need to

smitty mkvirprt, to define your printer and add the print queues,
chrctcp -a lpd, to have the line printer daemon start automatically at system boot time,
lpd, to start up the lpd daemon right now,
ruser -a -p +, to authorize remote hosts to print to your printer,
smitty qdefault, if you want to change your default printer, or use the command /usr/lib/lpd/pio/etc/piochdfq -q ps, for example.
Fill out the "Printer Definition Request Form" if you need to add to or change anything in the master Almaden printer directory for your printer.

Applying Service:

To install the latest fixes once you've installed the program products you want, as root,

smitty update_all
For the "INPUT device / directory for software" field, enter /afs/alm/common/inst.images/4.1.4.
Hit enter at the next screen to install the fixes.
Hit enter again at the "ARE YOU SURE?" prompt.
You'll typically see requisite errors during the update process and SMIT will claim the update process "FAILED". This is normal and nothing to worry about (it has to do with the way we NFS-mount the info data base).
When smit is finished installing all the updates, immediately shut the system down and reboot (shutdown -Fr). Do not log out before shutting down as applying service breaks the login process and you won't be able to log back in. When you reboot, you'll see the package program replace some files that this service just updated (like sendmail.cf, /usr/sbin/tsm, etc).