Support generic AIX platform (non-OS400)

[silverwind]

PRs welcome. Implementation must be pure JS.

[silverwind]

Seems it's impossible to virtualize AIX on x86 hardware, so I have to pass on supporting it.

[alexandrahrastnik]

Hi there,
we‘re having an AIX system (ppc64 architecture) and we‘re interested in making this package available on it. Since this package is a dependency for Angular as well as React, it‘s kind of necessary for us to get it working on our machine, in order to use these frameworks.
So, if you‘re still interested on working on support, please let us know.

[silverwind]

Can you post the exact output of these commands on a machine that ideally has both IPv4 and IPv6 gateways?

netstat -rn -f inet
netstat -rn -f inet6

[alexandrahrastnik]

I‘ll come back on Monday with the results. Thanks!

[alexandrahrastnik]

Unfortunately, the netstat command is not available in the AIX terminal.
I tried other commands as well (ifconfig, ip, net stat) but none of them is available.
There's a system command called netstat, but you cannot execute it in the bash ("Command NETSTAT invalid in this environment")
We're currently looking for some solution to access this information in node.
One option might be using IBM/nodejs-itoolkit - but I have to dig into it first.

[silverwind]

Would like to avoid additional dependencies if possible. Is there a /proc/net/route and /proc/net/ipv6_route file maybe?

[alexandrahrastnik]

There's a database table qsys2/netstat_route_info where I can find the default gateway. There's a command "db2" available to run sql through the shell. But the statement will throw a "permission denied" exception when I try to just run it in the shell.
It might work if I run it with the proper package. I'm working on some prototype to test this.

What I didn't mention so far: It's actually not a full AIX setup we're using - It's an integrated subsystem inside a System i (also known as AS/400). That's why not all the AIX commands will work here.

[alexandrahrastnik]

It took a few moments, but I was able to make an aix.js file that runs on our system (tested with test.js)
You can have a look on it here: https://github.com/patrickhrastnik/default-gateway
Do you want me to increase the version number in package.json before I create a PR?

[alexandrahrastnik]

Sorry to say, but I wasn't able to make the aix.js file without any of the packages IBM provides for database access in node...
I added the idb-connector as an optional dependency, thus installing default-gateway won't raise an error if you're installing it on another system but aix.