Table of Contents
AIX (Unix) Resources
Versions of AIX We Support
PARSEC provides professional services and operating system support services and AIX training. We support all AIX versions from 4.3 forward. We also provide support for IBM's virtualization suite called VIOS.
PARSEC Tech Support
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How To Initiate a PARSEC Tech Support Call
Creating a Snap Archive
Most AIX systems come pre-installed with a helpful utility called snap which is a command line tool to create a diagnostic bundle. This has most (not all) of the technical information one needs to troubleshoot an AIX system. In order to create a snap archive, use the command snap -ac which will deposit an archive in /tmp/ibmsupt/snap.pax.Z. We will need this archive for problem determination. Please send this via our FTP Server.
Sending TOPAS Data
Most AIX systems record the last week's worth of performance history in /etc/perf/daily. The files in this directory are actually binary and it's easier to work with them if they are decoded to CSV format before sending them. The tool topasout is available for this task. The syntax is topasout -c datafile where the 'datafile' is the file you find in /etc/perf/daily. You'll notice that you now have an output file in your current working directory. The file will have a similar name to the data file. This is a record of performance history for the 24 hour period recorded in the file. The sample frequency is every five minutes. This data can be graphed and interpreted for a clearer understanding of the systems performance.