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Open Source Utilities for AIX
Nov. 6th, 2021 07:23 pmI was tasked at work to find some monitoring tools for AIX. I'm familiar with AIX Toolbox and a few third party repositories. I wanted to build some programs from source code. I use a lot of portable programs and can port them to wide variety of platforms including AIX. However, monitoring tools in general are usually not too portable.
We already have nmon on the system. I also found source code for a related program njmon, but it's mostly for gathering statistics and then some kind of reporting utilities are needed to make sense of the data. I looked for top, but couldn't find it. Read that topas is available instead. I couldn't locate any source code for topas, so I guessed it was closed source. Just confirmed that. It's based on nmon for AIX code which is closed source. So nmon in AIX is not Open Source either. I would prefer to use Open Source tools so the source code can be modified if needed and so I can maintain and patch the software if necessary. Decided to try to build htop and it built on AIX with some patching. However, it didn't display anything and said platform unsupported. I found some old patches for AIX for an older version of htop that's not even in the current htop repository. I was able to incorporate the older patches into the latest version and get system related information to display. I contacted the htop project, but they're not at all interested in adding AIX support even if patches to do so are supplied to them. So, I'm debating whether to use a patched htop on AIX or whether I should look for another utility that can do a similar job but would be a better option for AIX systems. I found an old version of top that had AIX 5 support. It works fine on AIX pretty much as is. I've used saidar on BSD systems. It's part of libgrabstat. It built fine from source on AIX. I know there's an uptime utility on the system, but it should also be fairly easy to create a simple, portable uptime program that would work on a variety of platforms including AIX and Windows.
We also installed nano on AIX at some point. I think it's been removed from the AIX Toolbox since then. It's an old version of nano and seems rather buggy. When using nano via ssh, the scrolling gets really messed up. Rebuilt nano from a later version of the source code. It seems to work fine.
I'll be looking for other command line utilities that are somewhat portable and may work on AIX. Will add the results of my search here. If anyone runs across some useful tools that have AIX support or that port easily to AIX, please let me know. If anyone's interested in sharing code, patches or programs, contact me. Would also be very interested to hear what FLOSS programs others are using often on AIX systems.
We already have nmon on the system. I also found source code for a related program njmon, but it's mostly for gathering statistics and then some kind of reporting utilities are needed to make sense of the data. I looked for top, but couldn't find it. Read that topas is available instead. I couldn't locate any source code for topas, so I guessed it was closed source. Just confirmed that. It's based on nmon for AIX code which is closed source. So nmon in AIX is not Open Source either. I would prefer to use Open Source tools so the source code can be modified if needed and so I can maintain and patch the software if necessary. Decided to try to build htop and it built on AIX with some patching. However, it didn't display anything and said platform unsupported. I found some old patches for AIX for an older version of htop that's not even in the current htop repository. I was able to incorporate the older patches into the latest version and get system related information to display. I contacted the htop project, but they're not at all interested in adding AIX support even if patches to do so are supplied to them. So, I'm debating whether to use a patched htop on AIX or whether I should look for another utility that can do a similar job but would be a better option for AIX systems. I found an old version of top that had AIX 5 support. It works fine on AIX pretty much as is. I've used saidar on BSD systems. It's part of libgrabstat. It built fine from source on AIX. I know there's an uptime utility on the system, but it should also be fairly easy to create a simple, portable uptime program that would work on a variety of platforms including AIX and Windows.
We also installed nano on AIX at some point. I think it's been removed from the AIX Toolbox since then. It's an old version of nano and seems rather buggy. When using nano via ssh, the scrolling gets really messed up. Rebuilt nano from a later version of the source code. It seems to work fine.
I'll be looking for other command line utilities that are somewhat portable and may work on AIX. Will add the results of my search here. If anyone runs across some useful tools that have AIX support or that port easily to AIX, please let me know. If anyone's interested in sharing code, patches or programs, contact me. Would also be very interested to hear what FLOSS programs others are using often on AIX systems.
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