There are more classes relating to data such as parent/child relationships (e.g., multi-port adapters),
paths to SAN LUNs, or Vital Product Data (VPD)—the term used by IBM to include hardware-specific data
such as manufacturer, serial number, or firmware version. Feel free to explore these on your own
systems using the commands we will show you.
Installed Software (Package Management)
The classes associated with the AIX package manager are:
• lpp —- description and install state of each package
• product —- pre requisite and version information for each package
• inventory —- individual file data, one object per each file belonging to a package
• history —- dates of most recent install or update events for packages
System Management Interface Tool (SMIT)
Located in /usr/lib/objrepos, the set of classes beginning with the string sm_ contain all the
data necessary for SMIT to function. This includes all of the menu/submenu structure, the questions in all
the dialog screens, the commands used to generate lists, and so forth. These classes cannot be viewed or
edited.
It is interesting to note that as the whole structure of SMIT is database-driven, it makes it easy for IBM to
maintain it as new functionality requiring additions and changes to the SMIT menus dictate.
Network Installation Management (NIM)
Should you choose to build a NIM server (and in any AIX environment, you should!)—all the data
required to manage network installation, backup, recovery, and software maintenance is stored in a
group of classes beginning with nim_.
System Resource Controller (SRC)
The SRC is an AIX utility that brings the ordered structure of the ODM to bear on the task of organizing
daemon processes. The classes beginning with “SRC” contain the list of all known daemons and the
details of the commands needed to manage them. The master SRC daemon (srcmstr) is started from
/etc/inittab at boot and uses the SRC object class data to give the administrator a consistent way
to manage daemons using the startsrc, stopsrc, lssrc, and refresh commands.
Error Logging and Kernel Dump Configuration
There are some very small classes that contain information concerning the configuration of the kernel
log and also kernel dump configuration.
It is worthwhile to note that OS configuration data that does not fall into these categories is not
managed in any way by the ODM. For example, no user account data, such as login information,
password management, and so forth is stored in the ODM. Also, the ODM holds no storage
management data, so no information regarding Logical Volume Management (LVM), file systems or
mount tables is stored in the ODM.
Finally, let us look at some commands we can use to interact with the ODM.
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