Managing AIX with SMIT

David Carver

AIX administrators have a variety of tools available to help with systems administration, including:

• Web-based System Manager, an object-oriented GUI that provides assistance for less experienced administrators and remote administration of one or more machines from any client platform.
• The System Management Interface Tool, or SMIT, a task-oriented, menu-based interface that supports all common administration tasks. There are two versions of SMIT: an X Window version that provides GUI features such as point-and-click operations, and an ASCII text version that can be run on any character-mode terminal.
• AIX command strings, which can be invoked directly by the user from the command line or through scripts. Both Web-based System Manager and SMIT execute these same commands from within their interfaces.

Although each of these methods has advantages in different situations, my need for fast response time from both local and remote workstations makes the ASCII -based SMIT version (also known as SMITTY) one of my favorite administration tools. This article discusses several of SMIT's capabilities that can simplify management of RS/6000 SP systems.

SMIT Overview
SMIT is a unique and powerful tool for systems administration. It offers the following features:

• Two modes of operation (ASCII and X Window)
• An interactive, menu-driven, comprehensive user interface
• User assistance (helps) and prompting
• System management activity logging
• Fast paths to common system management tasks
• Command preview
• User-added SMIT screens

User Interface
The initial SMIT menu (Figure 1) organizes systems management tasks into high-level categories, such as Software Installation and Maintenance, Devices, and Users.