McNelly: Reflections on TechXchange
Rob McNelly shares his thoughts on last month's conference, praising the event for a wide variety of offerings that got attendees our of their comfort zones
I recently returned from last month’s TechXchange conference in Orlando. According to IBM, the event drew nearly 8,000 attendees, including 466 IBM Champions. With 1,500-some sessions, it certainly felt bigger than the Power Systems Technical Universities that I previously attended.
While I did experience a bit of nostalgia interacting with other AIX and IBM i pros and reminiscing about the olden days where we had our own conference devoted to “our” technology, I also saw the upside that comes from combining so many different technical areas into one event. Many folks were not typical IBM event attendees, but those I talked to were all impressed with the energy, the classes and the conference as a whole. Certainly it made for some interesting discussions around the different meal tables, in lines, or generally when you ran into someone and asked what they did.
In addition, I was able to learn about many products and solutions that I was unfamiliar with. Not that those 15-minute introductions make me any sort of expert, but I definitely know more now than I did going in.
Of course, what’s always great about live conferences is the opportunity to connect in real life with people that you typically only interact with online. While the full agenda coupled with the need to hike between sessions at the hotel and conference center limited the opportunities to socialize (I got my recommended number of steps in each day and then some, that’s for sure), I greeted as many attendees as I could.
I mentioned IBM Champions. If you were there you may have noticed seas of blue jackets—that was us, and I thought we were quite a sight. (On that note, if anyone has a group photo, please send a link or file my way.) Champions were also treated to fast passes at Universal Studios in Orlando—no waiting around for rides for us.
If you’re thinking of attending next year’s conference in Atlanta—and note that IBM is currently offering 50% discounts on passes for early, early bird entrants—I would expect that you would benefit from the experience. Especially if you take the time to attend sessions with topics that extend beyond your professional comfort zone. At least I found that I learned quite a bit by stepping out and going to labs and sessions that were not wholly focused on AIX and Power.
Tips and Updates from IBM Support
1) Here’s what to do if the ls command doesn’t execute:
“While executing ls command on a filesystem or a directory that has a lot of contents, the following error message appears [0653-340 There is not enough memory available now], and the command doesn’t execute…
“The main cause of this issue is the congestion of the data processed during the execution of the command. When it comes to listing a lot of files and directories in the filesystem or directory, congestion happens, which is due to the data limit in the /etc/security/limits file…
“To resolve the issue, you will need to change the data limit from 0.262144 MB to unlimited, this will increase the data stream that is passed to the ls command to be processed.”
2) This security bulletin provides details on a memory corruption vulnerability in RPM:
“A vulnerability in RPM could allow an attacker to cause a memory corruption issue (CVE-2025-6965). RPM is used by AIX for package management…
“IBM strongly recommends addressing the vulnerability immediately.
“The AIX and VIOS fixes can be downloaded via https…
“The link above is to a tar file containing this signed advisory, install packages, and OpenSSL signatures for each package. The fixes below include prerequisite checking. This will enforce the correct mapping between the fixes and AIX Technology Levels.”
3) If you’re using the HMC GUI to update a VIO server, you may encounter this database connection issue:
“When using HMC graphic user interface (GUI) to manage virtual networks or virtual storage on a managed system you might encounter a problem where you see a message, “Unable to connect to the Database Error occurred.” The error is describing a message the HMC is getting back from one or more Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) lpars when its trying to access While you cannot proceed past this type of error in the HMC GUI you will have to take action on the VIOS lpars to fix the problem as the issue deals with VIOS not being able to parse data out of its Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Most of the time the issue can be resolved by properly configuring name resolution on VIOS and in cases where that has already been done you might have to take additional measures to deal with CMDB corruption.”
Dealing with a VIOS Update
Another support tip, this one involving a client of mine. After recently updating their VIO servers, this concerning message appeared when they logged into the VIO server:
“The most recent software update has modified the current system rules. These modifications have not been deployed on the system. To view the modifications and deploy, run the rulescfgset command.”
While this document is accurate and you can run rulescfgset, in this case the admin had already run rules -o deploy -d, and rebooted. However, that did not clear out the message that they were seeing when logging in. After running rules -d diff -d and rules -o list, it was possible to confirm that the rules had actually been deployed, and it was easy enough to clear out /etc/motd so that the message no longer appeared on reboot.
Analysis of the AWS Outage
Here’s a pretty good breakdown of the recent Amazon Web Services outage and its future implications, from “Dave’s Garage” on YouTube.