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Comment by irusensei | Hacker News Reader

I did some work on AIX once. The thing that I remember is that I was granted some kind of zone/slice or wathever they call for compartmentalization. It didn't even had SSH so I had to use telnet.

The guy I was supposed to prepare the system for could only install Oracle from some crappy java UI wizard so I had to request the sysadmin to install a lot of Linux libraries and programs to enable X11 over SSH.

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From memory there was LPAR "Logical Partitions" - which were effectively like a VM. and there was WPAR "Workload Partitions" - which had a shared OS and were more like a container.

I had some "interesting" experiences getting stuff to work on WPAR's.

IIRC, WPARs could be just for one process, or full OS (but sharing the resources of one AIX instance, I guess that running on an LPAR or directly in the hardware).

But yeah, bit more like a container.

Then it was probably an LPAR. Are those reliant on hardware magic or just something like cgroups?

LPARs use hardware virtualization. The PowerVM hypervisor (PHYP) is in firmware.

I first learned on an AIX box in college; Cygwin/X gave me X11 access and worked perfectly, although I couldn’t tell you whether that used telnet or ssh. Back then I used telnet a lot without any regard for security.

> crappy java UI wizard

Nicely put (oof!). I believe it also enforced a minimal color depth, which none of our machines could directly support on their own hardware, forcing the use of remote X11 displays.

Sounds painful. Why is there no CLI installer? Fortunately, I never had to deal with Oracle.

Yes we first had a world of telnet and networks that allowed anyone who pierced them with a transceiver to be part of it (thicknet). It was a simpler/kinder/less malicious world than todays.

X Windows ran great on AIX before Linux was a thing. IBM was involved with its's inception (Project Athena).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5

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