System Management Concepts: Operating System and Devices

System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) Overview

Although Chapter 16, Web-based System Manager is the primary interface for system management, the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) provides an alternative, natural-language, task-oriented interface. The SMIT facility runs in two interfaces, ASCII (nongraphical) or AIXwindows (graphical).

SMIT steps you through the desired task with the use of menus, selectors, and dialogs, thereby freeing you from the details of complex command syntax, valid parameter values, and system command spelling. In addition, SMIT creates log files that you can use to duplicate system configuration or to learn how to use specific commands.

Note: In a networked environment, you can use Distributed SMIT as discussed in the Distributed SMIT 2.2 for AIX: Guide and Reference.

In the SMIT interface, main menu selections lead to submenus, helping to narrow the scope of choice to a particular task. To skip the main menu and directly access a submenu or dialog, you can use the smit command with a Fast Path parameter.

To learn more about SMIT, you can:

• Start SMIT, then select Using SMIT (Information Only) from the SMIT Main Menu.
• In the SMIT dialogs, select On Context (Ctrl+F1) from the Help menu and move the cursor over the particular menu item or field about which you want more information.

The following table lists some basic SMIT tasks: