Tanti Technology

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Multi-platform UNIX systems consultant and administrator in mutualized and virtualized environments I have 4.5+ years experience in AIX system Administration field. This site will be helpful for system administrator in their day to day activities.Your comments on posts are welcome.This blog is all about IBM AIX Unix flavour. This blog will be used by System admins who will be using AIX in their work life. It can also be used for those newbies who want to get certifications in AIX Administration. This blog will be updated frequently to help the system admins and other new learners. DISCLAIMER: Please note that blog owner takes no responsibility of any kind for any type of data loss or damage by trying any of the command/method mentioned in this blog. You may use the commands/method/scripts on your own responsibility. If you find something useful, a comment would be appreciated to let other viewers also know that the solution/method work(ed) for you.

Monday, 21 October 2013

Knowing the aix filesystem structure

what is filesystem?


A filesystem is a set of files ,directories and other structures.


filesystem maintains information and identify the location of a file or directory's data .


it may also contain  a boot block, a superblock ,bitmaps and one or more allocation groups.


*allocation group contains disk i-nodes and fragments.




filesystem supported by aix


    1.  JFS(journaled filesystem)
    2.  JFS2(enhanced journaled filesystem)
    3.  NFS(network filesystem)
    4.  CDRFS(cd-rom filesystem)


JFS


it uses database journaling techniques, such as recording file changes sequentially,  to a mintain the integrity of control structure.


each journaled filesysten resides on distint jfs logical volume


JFS2
it uses extent based allocation to allow higher performance,larger filesystem and larger file-size.


each enhanced journaled filesystem must reside on a distinct JFS2 logical volume.


when aix is installed using default option ,it creates JFS2 filesystem.


NFS


it is distributed filesystem that allows users to access files and directories located on remote computers and use those files and directories as they are local.


CDRFS


this filesystem allows you to access the content of CD-ROM through the normal filesystem interfaces.




filesystem structure


journaled file-system uses following data structures:


               1.)  superblock
               2.)  allocation group
               3.)  inodes
               4.)  blocks
               5.)  fragments
               6.)  device logs


superblock


super block contains controlinformation aboyt a filesyatem such as
 1. overall size of file-system in 512 byte blocks
 2. file-system name
 3. file-system log device
 4. version no.
 5. no. of inodes 
 6. list of free inodes,free blocks
 7. date and time of creation
 8. file-system state


corruption of super-block may lead the  filesystem to become un-usable.


***the system keeps a second copy of the super-block on logical block 31.


allocation group


An allocation group consists of inodes and its correspondong data blocks.


An allocation group spans multiple adjacentdisk blocks and improves the speed of i/o operations


inode


inode contains control information about the file .it contains following details of files

 1. type
2. size
3. owner
4. date and time of creation
5. last accessed
6. a pointer to block that stores the actual data


# istat  /abhi/aks


data block 


data block stores the actual data of the file or pointers to another data block




device logs


the jfs log stores transactional information about filesystem metadata changes. this data can be used to roll back incomplete operations if the machine crashes.




*filesystem used for logging is of type "jfs2log"
in aix, hd8 is the common log  


things you must know

/root            -  it is root user home directory.

/home          - here all users that you have created will be stored.

/bin             -  it contains executable binaries that any user can run.

/sbin           -  it contains the executable binaries that only admin or root  user can run.

/etc              - it contains all the configuration files. like files related to DNS ,DHCP configuration etc

/dev             -  as we know that in unix everything is file. so, all devices that are defined in aix will have one
                                     file in this directory.

/tmp             -      it contains all the temporary files.

/var               -     it contains all the log files                     

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