Table of Contents
AIX NIM Network
To use NIM with a client behind a firewall we need to know which ports and protocols should be allowed to access through the firewall. The documentation of IBM gives us an overview of the ports and protocols:
In addition to these protocols there are a few more things that you should do:
DNS
The ability to make DNS lookups are required for both registering the client as for doing the NFS mount. Please note that the client should have both A as PTR records listed in the DNS server.
ICMP
As described in AIX NIM Client Installation you can test basic network connectivity by sending pings in the SMS menu. Since ICMP works on layer 3 you know that any problem you encounter is not in the first 3 layers.
Implementation
In case the firewall rules are implemented as a cisco access list based firewall I created a special page on how to set things up (based on vlans etc.): Cisco VLAN Access Lists
Discussion