AIX 3.2/3.1 Installation from scratch(under construction)


Prerequisites

Base system

Via network

Found an old recipe for 3.1.5 installation from a colleague of mine, (PDF) (in German)

From tape

I used a DDS-1 copy of an original 8mm tape, with a generic DDS drive. AFAIR early AIX versions (3.1) required an IBM branded drive.
  1. Plug in all hardware, including external tape drive.
  2. Switch the key into "service" position.
  3. Insert first boot diskette, power on.
  4. The boot procedure will read the diskettes one by one, and will display a 3-digit LED code together with the blinking floppy LED when the next diskette must be inserted.
    1/5: reads until c07, 2/5: until c07, 3/5: until c09 (be patient), 4/5 until c31.
    At this point the green screen should appear and the definition of the system console is requested. Just follow the instructions, the installation will proceed automatically.
The minimal installation takes some 130MB on rootvg.

Additional Software

From tape

Additional useful software from install tape:
   INed, X11.dev, bos.adt, bos.ext, bos.net, txtfmt, xlc 1.3, 3270
In particular the networking filesets are mandatory, otherwise it would not be possible to configure network cards.
Makes 440MB on rootvg.

You may install yet more software, as much as your disk can hold. The AIX 3.2.5 tape file sets comprise approx 1GB. Before doing so, however, one should increase the /tmp filesystem to at least 16MB (32768 512byte blocks):

   smitty 

   System Storage Management - File Systems - 
   Add / Change / Show / Delete File Systems -
   Journaled File Systems - Change / Show Characteristics of a Journaled File System
otherwise the installation might fail due to lack of space for temporary files. The target file systems, however, are enlarged automatically.

Basic customizations

  1. Some security measures:
    1. In /etc/inetd.conf disable all unnecessary services. If the machine should offer boot services, bootps and tftp must be enabled.
    2. Disable unnecessary yp access:
      chmod o-x /usr/bin/ypcat
      
    3. In /etc/rc.tcpip
      outcomment the start of snmpd.
  2. In /etc/inittab the console should be activated before NIS services:
    rctcpip:2:wait:/etc/rc.tcpip > /dev/console 2>&1 # Start TCP/IP daemons
    cons:0123456789:respawn:/usr/sbin/getty /dev/console
    rcnfs:2:wait:/etc/rc.nfs > /dev/console 2>&1 # Start NFS Daemons
    
    otherwise the machine won't boot if NIS can't be activated. Note that the rcnfs line must be present in order for the automount daemon to work.
  3. /etc/environment
    should contain
    YPBIND_MAXWAIT=5   # wait only 5 seconds     
    
    to avoid NIS hangs in case of network unavailability.
    Note: not tested if this will work as early as AIX 3.
  4. Configure the network
  5. Use
    smitty - System Environments - Change Number of Licensed Users
    
    and tab to Greater than 64 to allow other users than root
  6. Unlike later versions of AIX, rootvg in 3.1/3.2 has no /opt/ filesystem to hold local freeware und such. Use smitty to create a hd10opt logical volume (32MB minimum) and the respective JFS (at mount point /opt). See example how to create LVs/JFSs. If not sure how large the "logical partition" size is, use size=1 to begin with. Use
    smitty 
    Physical & Logical Storage - File Systems - Add / Change / Show / Delete File Systems - Journaled File Systems
    
    to increase the size if needed.
  7. IIrc some early AIX versions needed
    chmod a-t /tmp
    
    to allow xinit (to start X desktop). Can't remember if this is true for AIX 3.2.

Additional local software

InfoExplorer and man pages

Early AIX versions (up to and including 4.2) offer documentation in a proprietary hypertext format which needs a special reader software, InfoExplorer (we are dealing with the pre-HTML era here :-). InfoExplorer as well as some of the documentation filesets are included on the OS installation media. These filesets are named "Documentation" or carry the extension .info. Yet more documentation (approx 300MB total) can be found on the separate InfoExplorer CD. Unfortunately it is not smit-installable. You may use the following procedure to install more documentation:
   mount -r -vcdrfs /dev/cd0 /cdrom # mount the CD
   ls -l /cdrom                     # list all info available on the CD
   ls -l /usr/lpp/info/lib/En_US/   # list all info already available on the system
                                    # copy info datasets, typically not found on base media
   cp -p -r -h /cdrom/hardware /usr/lpp/info/lib/En_US/
   cp -p -r -h /cdrom/update   /usr/lpp/info/lib/En_US/
You might need to increase the /usr manually:
   smitty

   Physical & Logical Storage -
   File Systems - 
   Add / Change / Show / Delete File Systems -
   Journaled File Systems -
   Change/Show ... 

AIX version 3 doesn't come with separate man pages, the man command reuses the InfoExplorer datasets. For this to work, the steering file /usr/lpp/info/data/ispaths must exist. After a fresh installation, this file points only to a minimum amount of information. To get more, use:

cp -p /usr/lpp/info/data/ispaths /usr/lpp/info/data/ispaths.save
cp -p /usr/lpp/info/data/ispaths.full /usr/lpp/info/data/ispaths

More

   mount -r rs6kf:/applfs/applb01/AIX /mnt
   /mnt/POWER/32/installopt.sh

Compilers

(and their patches), if available:

What's next ?

After installation you will need to customize your system.
Last update: 4-Jan-2013, M.Kraemer