Way over my head?

I feel like I'm back in college! Here I am at my new desk, cramming docs on Solaris and AIX.

I just started here at the new workplace. The first impressions were great. The environment is a bit subdued, not like in my previous one, which was, uh, "colorful". That's not to say that the people here are drones, though.

I'll be handling Unix servers that run mission-critical applications for this organization. The administrative tasks haven't been formally turned over to me yet, so instead of just shifting my a** in my seat, I wallowed in tech pr0n -- that's tons of Unix admin guides.

Yesterday, I was able to prep several SAN LUNs on an EMC 8530, using AIX, for data migration later from a Symmetrix DMX. Here's an AIX survival tip: Use smitty! (Learned that from a former colleague who's now a sys ad at Globe.) Wonderful tool.

AIX LVM methods are very similar to that of RHEL. I just have to familiarize myself more with the (for me) quirky commands (chvg is to RHEL's lvchange, for example). But the concepts are the same: prep the physical volumes; add them to a volume group; create logical volumes; create the file system and mount point.

I'll also be going through several Jumpstart scripts. Jumpstart is Solaris' Kickstart equivalent, on the surface, but is a lot more detailed (read: complicated). Instead of a single ks.cfg Anaconda script, Solaris uses rules and profile files. The rules file also has to be validated first. As I read more about it, I get this feeling that Jumpstart's similarity to Kickstart ends with 'start'. Heh.

Considering that my background is mostly on Linux, with a little Solaris and spotty AIX, I'm thinking that maybe I'm in over my head here. Then again, they're all Unix so the functional similarities remain. For now, I have to mentally map Solaris and AIX methods to their Linux equivalents. I'll get the hang of it, for sure.