Running Puppet on AIX
Puppet on AIX is... not officially supported, yet still useful (at least one site has it deployed in a production environment). It doesn't work with the ruby packages that are available from bull at http://www.bullfreeware.com/, as they lack socket functionality, however it does when ruby is built from source with openssl support (at least on 5.2 and 5.3! On early versions, milage may very etc). Currently, as at 0.22.4 there is still some big holes in functionality, specifically:
- Mount doesn't work. Thank you, IBM!
- Cron jobs mysteriously fail with 'crontab: cannot access'.
- Service management via init works, however AIX by default uses something else for internal packages
(fill in more about AIX horror!)
mount support will require a new provider to support /etc/filesystems
The traditional tool on aix for system management is a smitty which is a form based tui thing which works pretty well but the actuall commands it runs are full of pain and suffering.. eg: install a program
/usr/lpp/bos.sysmgt/nim/methods/c_sm_nim cust -l '0042-008' -o '0042-008 NIMstate: Request denied - Method_req' -f '' -f '' -f '' -f 'c' -f 'N' -f 'g' -f 'X' -f '' -f ''
notice multiple position dependent options with the same option name YAY
Use installp to install software.
/etc/inittab is managed by {ch,ls,mk,rm}itab commands. Do not write changes to this as a text file.
/etc/filesystems is managed by the LVM, so be careful. You can edit /etc/filesystems like a text file, but it'll be lost if an importvg/exportvg is performed...
Most things can be managed in AIX via command line instead of editing text files.
