|
Softpanorama |
||||||
| Contents | Bulletin | Latest | Last year | Top visited | Scriptorama | |
HP-UX got a second life after it was ported to Itanium (HP Integrity systems). In a way it refused to die with PA-RISK. As of 2009 the Itanium CPUs are almost exclusively used by servers made by HP, which have over 95% of the Itanium server market share. As Microsoft and Red Hat bailed out of support of Itanium, so HP-UX is the only game in town for those CPUs. Intel still crank new models of Itanium, although it is clear that the CPU is a fiasco. The latest as of November 2010 is series 9300 CPU (release in spring 2010) which supports DDR3 memory. Price/performance ratio is low in comparison with X86-64 CPUs and even with Sun/Oracle T3. On the plus side Itanium has good floating point performance. HP-UX traditionally have good disk managing capabilities and often used for databases. There are strong user forums (IT Resource Center forums) where you can find advice on various aspects of HP-UX, althouth your mileage can vary.
In some respects HP-UX is probably the most archaic Unix on the market. For example, as of version 11.31 it still does not have /proc subsystem. Location of many configuration files is non-standard, but in many cases this deficiency can be corrected by using symlinks. Command set is quite idiosyncratic, but it is less idiosyncratic then in AIX. At least HP did not go as far as to rename useradd and groupadd commands ;-).
Default settings are pretty archaic, if not bizarre for XXI century. Some of them ( kill as @) were not updated for 15 years or more. And for some strange reason they interfere with scripting in Perl. For example, there is a problem with @ character in HP-UX that goes beyond simple inconvenience.
For example, try the following Perl script in HP-UX 11.11 with "stock", supplied by OS, version of Perl:
$MAIL='/usr/bin/mailx'; $DF='/bin/bdf -l'; $list='joe.doers@firm.com'; `stty kill "^U" && $DF | $MAIL -s "Test of @ problem" $list > /tmp/chk_bizarre_results.txt`;
Here is a relevant quote from HP-UX FAQ, but it does not solve this particular problem:
Subject: 8.14 Why can't I type an '@' character?
If you do a 'stty -a' and you will see that your 'kill' character is set to '@'. You need to set your 'kill' character to be something other than the '@' character by doing something like 'stty kill '^U''. You should add this to your .profile or .cshrc file.
Location of many system files is strange. For example, instead of /etc/init.d is location /sbin/init.d is used. Thanks God /etc/initd.conf is in normal place, but TCP wrappers are not installed (they are available as a download from HP (see TCP Wrappers)
To make ftp, telnet, and login services use TCP_wrapper you need to modify lines in the /etc/inetd.conf file that are related to daemon you wish to protect. For example:
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/in.ftpd in.ftpd telnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/in.telnetd in.telnetd login stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/in.telnetd in.rlogind
Put in the location of the tcpd daemon, instead of the location of the service daemon:
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.ftpd telnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.telnetd login stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.rlogindTo test functionality put in /etc/hosts.deny file
in.ftpd : paranoid in.telnet : paranoid in.rlogind : paranoid
After that you need to send kill -HUP to the inetd process to make the changes effective. Now try to connect from a host that does not have a DNS name. Connection should rejected.
Default shell in HP-UX is Posix shell which is ridiculously weak for interactive usage. Ksh88 is available, ksh93 is not. Bash is not included by default, but bash 4.0 can (and probably should; see Bash on HP-UX) be installed to less the pain of adaptation. Please note that it is too buggy for scripting, so scripting should be done in ksh. Here are some advantages for such a transition:
Location of many system configuration files is idiosyncratic much like AIX, but still, unlike AIX, HP-UX does provide syslog by default. Location of syslog messages file is strange though: /var/adm/syslog (you can fix this idiosyncrasy like many others by creating symlinks. In this case
ls -s /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log /var/adm/messages )
Init.d directory for some reason is a subdirectory of sbin, so to start, say named daemon you need to use command
/sbin/init.d/named start
Again symlink might ease the pain of this strange decision.
That does not mean that HP-UX is completely free of innovations. It does supports RBAC. It was the first Unix to use access control lists for file access permissions rather than the standard Unix permissions system. The problem is that I still never saw an organization that managed to use ACLs constructively ;-).
HP-UX was also among the first Unix systems to include a built-in logical volume manager based on VERITAS implementation.
But all-in-all even in version 11.31 this is a pretty archaic and idiosyncratic version of Unix. The only more idiosyncratic is AIX, but this is not a big achievement for HP-UX developers. For most sysadmin used to Linux or Solaris HP-UX sucks and is a pain to administer. Price/performance of Itanium servers is bad and getting worse with time.
Most commands that reveal hardware configuration are idiosyncratic. For example analog to Linux command cat /proc/cpuinfo is machinfo:
$ machinfo
CPU info:
2 Intel(R) Itanium(R) Processor 9320s (1.33 GHz, 16 MB)
4.79 GT/s QPI, CPU version E0
8 logical processors (4 per socket)
Memory: 16286 MB (15.9 GB)
Firmware info:
Firmware revision: 01.08
FP SWA driver revision: 1.18
IPMI is supported on this system.
BMC firmware revision: 1.01
Platform info:
Model: "ia64 hp Integrity BL860c i2"
Machine ID number: 28c79d30-efdd-11df-9e27-000000000000f
Machine serial number: USE00000R0
OS info:
Nodename: nti106
Release: HP-UX B.11.31
Version: U (unlimited-user license)
Machine: ia64
ID Number: 0684170000
vmunix adb: error: /stand/current/vmunix: Permission denied.
Here is some laments on the popular theme "What HP-UX gets wrong" typical for those who previously administer Solaris or Linux and now need to adapt to a new environment (partially borrowed from Solaris versus HP-UX)
|
|
|
|||
|
|
||||
| Bulletin | Latest | Past week | Past month | |
HP
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) enables you to transfer files between a client host system and a remote server host system. On the client system, a file transfer program provides a user interface to FTP; on the server, the requests are handled by the FTP daemon, ftpd. WU-FTPD is the FTP daemon for HP-UX systems. It is based on the replacement FTP daemon developed at Washington University. WU-FTPD 2.6.1 is the latest version of WU-FTPD available on the HP-UX 11i v1, HP-UX 11i v2, and HP-UX 11i v3 platforms.
The FTP client with SSL support is available for download from this page for the HP-UX 11i v2 operating system. Starting from May 2010, the WU-FTPD 2.6.1 bundle that you can download from this page contains the FTP daemon with SSL support for the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system.
Table 1: Latest WU-FTPD 2.6.1 Bundle Numbers
Product Version
NumberOperating System Bundle Version
NumberRelease Date WU-FPTD 2.6.1 Bundle Versions HP Revision: 1.014a HP-UX 11i v1 B.11.11.01.014 July 2010 HP Revision: 1.001a HP-UX 11i v2b B.11.23.01.001 September 2008 HP Revision: 6.0a HP-UX 11i v3b C.2.6.1.7.0 May 2011
IPv6-enabled version of WU-FTPD 2.6.1 available.
b The TLS/SSL feature is available for the HP-UX 11i v2 and HP-UX 11i v3 operating systems.WU-FTPD 2.6.1 offers the following features:
- Virtual hosts support
- The privatepw utility
- New clauses in the /etc/ftpd/ftpaccess file
- IPv6 support
- New command-line options
- New features related to data transfer
- New configuration file, /etc/ftpd/ftpservers
- A set of virtual domain configuration files used by ftp
WU-FTPD 2.6.1 for the HP-UX 11i v2 and HP-UX 11i v3 operating systems now supports the TLS/SSL feature. For more information on the TLS/SSL feature, see WU-FTPD 2.6.1 Release Notes on the HP Business Support Center.
IMPORTANT: The WU-FTPD 2.6.1 depot that you can download from this page is the TLS/SSL-enabled version of FTP. The core (default) HP-UX 11i v2 operating system still contains the non-TLS/SSL version of FTP. For patch updates to WU-FTPD 2.6.1 in the core HP-UX 11i v2 operating system, see http://itrc.hp.com
Compatibility Information
For HP-UX 11i v1 customers, WU-FTPD 2.6.1 adds new functionality to the already existing WU-FTPD 2.4 software, which is delivered as part of the core networking products on HP-UX 11i v1. For HP-UX 11.0, this version allows customers to upgrade to WU-FTPD 2.6.1 from either the legacy FTP version, which is delivered with the core networking products on HP-UX 11.0, or from WU-FTPD 2.4, which is available in the patch PHNE_21936.
Documentation
The following product documentation is available with WU-FTPD 2.6.1.Man Pages
The following man pages are distributed with the WU-FTPD 2.6.1 depot:
- ftp.1
- ftpd.1m
- ckconfig.1
- ftprestart.1
- ftpwho.1
- ftpcount.1
- ftpshut.1
- privatepw.1
- ftpaccess.4
- ftpgroups.4
- ftpservers.4
- ftpconversions.4
- ftpusers.4
- ftphosts.4
- xferlog.5
The TCP Wrappers product suite provides an enhanced security mechanism for services spawned by the Internet services daemon, inetd. TCP Wrappers is available on HP-UX 11i platform as a web upgrade. Please visit www.docs.hp.com for related product documentation.Whenever a connection is established with inetd for a service, inetd runs tcpd, the wrapper program instead of running the service program directly. On inception, tcpd will perform some access control checks and execute the desired service program.
tcpd offers the following features:
- Complete Access control.The product suite also contains the utility programs : tcpdmatch, tcpdchk, try-from, and safe_finger.
- Checks against host name / address spoofing.
- RFC931 lookup for remote user who owns the connection.
- Support for services that use XTI as well as sockets.
- Setting Traps
- Banner Messages.
It also contains a library, libwrap.a which has the host access control functions in it.With TCP Wrappers, you can:
- monitor incoming requests for Internet Services
- control access to services spawned by inetd
- enforce access control in stand-alone daemon programs
- predict how TCP Wrapper would handle a specific request for a service
- check the wrapper's behaviour from a remote shell
Useful Information
The following are the components of the TCP Wrappers software depot:The following product documentation is available with this release of TCP Wrappers:
/usr/lbin/tcpd TCP Wrappers daemon program. /usr/lib/libwrap.a TCP Wrappers library containing access control APIs, using /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny. /usr/include/tcpd.h Header file for libwrap.a. /usr/bin/tcpdchk Tool to examine the validity of configuration file entries. /usr/bin/tcpdmatch Tool to simulate the Wrappers daemon program's i.e., tcpd's behaviour for a particular host and for a particular service. /usr/bin/try-from A utility program that can be invoked from a remote shell to get connection end-points' information. /usr/bin/safe_finger A secure finger client program. /usr/newconfig/etc/tcpd.conf A sample configuration file for the TCP Wrappers daemon program. /usr/newconfig/etc/hosts.allow A sample ACL file to specify hosts to be allowed. /usr/newconfig/etc/hosts.deny A sample ACL file to specify hosts to be denied. /usr/share/doc/TCPWRAP-RelNotes.pdf A detailed Release Notes explaining the features supported in this release. Man Pages
- tcpd(1M)
- tcpdmatch(1)
- tcpdchk(1)
- hosts_access(3)
- hosts_access(5)
- hosts_options(5)
- tcpd.conf(4)
- try-from(1)
Release Notes
The Release Notes is also available at,
http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/netcom/index.html#Internet%20Services.
Additional product information Version: - Software specification: Workstation/Server, HP-UX11.11
Jan 18, 2004 | HP Communities
The following assumes that you downloaded TCP wrappers from hpux.connect.org.uk or one of the mirrors. I think (but I might be wrong) that support for keyword "banners" may not be compiled in.
If you have a look at the source code package Makefile at http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/cgi-bin/wwwtar?/hpux/Networking/Admin/tcp_wrappers-7.6/tcp_wrappers-7....
, you will find that optional features are not enabled.#STYLE = -DPROCESS_OPTIONS # Enable language extensions.So you can get the source code package from http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/ftp/hpux/Networking/Admin/tcp_wrappers-7.6/tcp_wrappers-7.6-ss-11.00.tar.gz... uncomment the STYLE line from Makefile and recompile the package.
Alternative is to get TCP Wrappers from HP software web site. It seems to have optional features compiled in (but I haven't verified this).
http://www.software.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=TCPWRAP
Overview of MemFS − Memory based file system and its usage − Design overview and limitations of HP-UX 11i v2 MemFS − Design overview and advantages of HP-UX 11i v3 MemFS 3 − Comparison of HP-UX 11i v3 MemFS with other memory file system products ( e.g. HP-UX 11i v2 MemFS, Solaris tmpfs, Linux tmpfs, VxFS ) − Features available − Performance
Memory-based file system and its usage
− Storage for temporary files
− For getting better performance with the applications which does extensive metadata operations like creation, deletion of files and directories
Disadvantages
− Can not be used as a replacement for disk based file system as it does not preserve data across mounts/reboots
− Excessive use of system memory by it can adversely affect other memory consumers
VentureBeat
But the loss of Oracle will hurt Intel, as it isn’t the only one to abandon Itanium. Microsoft and RedHat abandoned making optimized software for Itanium last year. Microsoft said that last year’s Windows Server 2008 R2 was the last operating system to support the Intel 64-bit chip, while RedHat’s final support was Enterprise Linux 6.
HP-UX remains the only big supporter of Itanium, from an operating system view. HP dominates the market for Itanium-based servers. Talking to Cnet, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said five years ago, “There is no more important platform for Oracle than HP and Itanium.”
During his own strategy talk last week, HP CEO Léo Apotheker didn’t say anything about Itanium. But HP still said Oracle’s move was “shameless gambit” to hurt competitors. HP also said it is continuing development on Itanium-based servers and will do so for the next 10 years and it said that Sun’s market share is failing.
“Oracle continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behavior as they move to shore up their failing Sun server business,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking at HP. “HP believes in fair and honest competition. Competition is good for customers, innovation and the marketplace. We are shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity in a shameless gambit to limit fair competition.”
Intel is still promoting its next-generation Itanium chips, as Intel CEO Paul Otellini pointed out today. In February, Intel unveiled its 10th-generation Itanium chip, code-named Poulson, a beast of a chip with 3 billion basic components known as transistors.
“We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture,” Otellini said.
The Itanium has had a long rollercoaster history. Started as a joint venture with HP in 1994, the first chip was a relic of an age when power consumption didn’t matter. It was supposed to debut in 1999, but the code-named Merced chip finally came out in 2001, just in time for the post-9/11 recession. Intel’s primary competition was its own 32-bit Xeon chips, which were faster at running 32-bit software than the 64-bit Itanium was. So the great migration of computing from 32-bit to 64-bit didn’t happen for the masses, as had originally been expected, and Intel added 64-bit technology into its Xeon line-up.
Intel continued to invest, challenging the shrinking number of players in the reduced-instruction set computing (RISC) computing business such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Intel says that it is still attacking the $15 billion RISC market with Itanium. Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices seized its chance to get a foothold in 32-bit server chips and it has succeeded in grabbing a chunk of that market.
Intel’s new Poulson chip is slated to come out some time in the future, as will another one code-named Kittson. Otellini said those chips are on schedule
Mar 22, 2011 | http://www.marketwire.com/
After multiple conversations with Intel senior management Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has decided to discontinue all software development on the Intel Itanium microprocessor. Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing the end of its life.
Both Microsoft and RedHat have already stopped developing software for Itanium. HP CEO Leo Apotheker made no mention of Itanium in his long and detailed presentation on the future strategic direction of HP.
Oracle will continue to provide customers with support for existing versions of Oracle software products that already run on Itanium.
Background
I got my start as a UNIX sysadmin using Solaris back in college, and I've been a fan of Solaris ever since. Where I work, there is often talk of Sun versus HP for large UNIX systems, and I am always a proponent of Sun's systems, mainly because of Solaris.
Many people are quick to dismiss my opinion as a simple personal preference, thinking that since I'm more familiar with Solaris I'm basing my opinion on my emotions and not giving HP fair consideration. I have spent a decent amount of time on HP-UX, though, and I have created the list below to detail the reasons why I believe that from a system administrator's perspective, Solaris is a superior operating system to HP-UX.
For the comparison, I chose relatively older but still very popular versions of both operating systems:
- Solaris 8 (also known as SunOS 5.8 or Solaris 2.8), released in 2000
- HP-UX 11iv1 (also known as HP-UX 11.11), released in 2000
To be fair, I have found many features of HP-UX that I am quite fond of and wish Solaris had. I've pointed those out below as well.
What HP-UX gets wrong
- No shadow passwords by default. Shadow passwords are possible, but you have to turn them on after installing the OS. Not having these is a huge security issue, and HP turns a blind eye toward it by making the administrator fix the gaping out-of-the-box security hole.
- No process-tracing program by default. Out of the box, HP-UX has no equivalent of the Solaris truss or Linux strace program to let you trace a process' system calls. One is available (tusc), but it's on a supplemental CD. This is an essential tool of any operating system, and should be available on every installation.
- No /usr/proc/bin-equivalent tools at all. The Solaris /usr/proc/bin utilities are incredibly useful. There's pstack to show you a process' stack (for each thread), psig to see the signal handlers for a process, ptree to draw an ASCII chart of a process' parents and children, and several others. Most of these aren't tools you need all the time, but when you need them, there is no substitute. HP-UX has none of these.
- Difficult to tell how much physical memory is installed. This came as quite a shock to me, but there's no sure-fire, easy way to quickly see how much memory is installed in an HP-UX system. The most common answer I see to this question is to run dmesg and look for a particular message that was logged at boot time, but that doesn't work your system has been up a long time. There's a C interface to get this information, but no built-in command line utility. I eventually wrote a simple C program to return the amount of physical memory, but it shouldn't be that hard.
- Difficult to tell if you have a more recent version of a particular patch installed. Let's suppose you hear about a security vulnerability in your OS, and the vendor has already released a patch. You want to check whether you already have this patch (or a later version of it) installed on your system, but this is difficult with HP-UX. With Solaris, the patch you're checking for would be named something like 123456-02. Any later versions of that patch would begin with "123456-" and increment the last number, so it's easy to see if you have the patch in question or later (meaning you don't need to worry about the issue the patch resolved). With HP-UX, the patch you're looking for would be named something like PHKL_12345, but any later versions of it would have completely different numbers. There's no way to easily tell if you have a later version of that patch — all you can easily tell is if you have the version in question or not.
- Can't use @ or # characters in passwords by default. By default, the @ and # characters won't work in passwords because /bin/login interprets them as kill and erase, respectively. Sure, you can fix this, but would you ever have expected this? Suppose you're running a mixed environment, where the HP-UX systems use NIS or LDAP to use passwords created on another platform. Any users with these characters in their passwords won't be able to log in. Maybe these terminal settings were useful twenty years ago when we used our UNIX servers to connect dozens of 80-character terminals, but those days are long gone, and this default is ridiculous.
- Can't tell what a device is from its hardware path. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I could stare at the HP-UX hardware paths for devices all day without realizing that 0/1/1/0.1.0 is a disk and 0/4/1/0 is a network adapter. In Solaris, those would be more like /devices/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@0,0:a for the disk and /devices/pseudo/clone@0:hme for the network adapter. These seem just as arbitrary at first, but there are clues in the pathnames: "sd" is the driver for SCSI disks, and "hme" is the driver for hundred-megabit Ethernet NICs.
- No single command to shut down and power off. In Solaris, an init 5 will shut down and power off, and an init 0 will shut down and halt. HP-UX gives you only the latter, and if you're shutting down a system for hardware replacement, your only choice is to shutdown -h, wait for the console message that says it's okay to power off, and either physically power off then, or log in to the MP/GSP and issue the poweroff there.
- The kernel must be relinked when tunables are changed. I thought we were past the days when you needed a compiler and some source code to make a tuning change to the kernel, but HP-UX isn't. Where Solaris would just need an edit to /etc/system, HP-UX needs to update some header files and relink the kernel.
- Kernel tunable defaults are not reasonable. The HP-UX defaults for lots of tunables look like they haven't been updated in 15 years. For example, the default for the maximum number of processes any non-root user can have running (maxuprc) is 75.
- Startup scripts belong in /etc, not /sbin. Most System V unices place startup scripts in /etc/init.d and /etc/rc?.d, but HP-UX puts them in /sbin/init.d and /sbin/rc?.d. If it was 20 years ago and we were having a debate about where the startup scripts should go, I'd vote for /sbin instead of /etc. But other vendors have been doing things one way for 20 years, and HP-UX could at least give admins coming from another flavor of UNIX the courtesy of a symlink. But they don't.
- Huge copyright message at every login. If you've never logged in to a HP-UX system before, you're missing out — your login is greeted by a 28-line list of copyright messages. Every time. Is this really necessary? Somehow, I doubt Sun is jeopardizing their copyrights to Solaris by not assaulting their users with these notices dozens of times each day.
- Syslog rotation is inadequate. HP-UX's idea of rotating the syslog is to copy syslog.log to OLDsyslog.log when the system boots. That leaves you with not much logging at all if you boot your system frequently, or probably too much logging if you rarely boot your system. Now, Solaris 8 isn't too much better at log rotation, but it rotates your syslog once a week and keeps four old copies in addition to the current one, so you always know how much log information you have. With HP-UX, you may have a little or you may have a lot. You'll probably never know until you need some old information and don't have it.
- Sendmail configuration is painful. HP-UX doesn't give you the m4 configuration files for sendmail so that you can use the m4 macros to generate a sendmail.cf. Instead, they expect you to hack sendmail.cf directly. This is not the way sendmail is intended to be configured.
- Load average calculations are different. In HP-UX, unlike Solaris, Linux, or just about any other UNIX, load averages reported by uptime are divided by the number of processors in the system, so that a load average of 1.0 means the system has as many processes in the run queue as it has processors. That's all well and good, and it might even be a better approach than the other vendors, but once again HP-UX breaks with tradition and confuses administrators of other platforms.
- You need a patch and special mount option to read a CD-ROM with RockRidge extensions. The ISO9660 filesystem format, used on CD-ROMs, limits the filenames to 8.3-character names. RockRidge extensions allow longer filenames and allow UNIX file permissions to be stored on the CD-ROM. HP-UX is the only UNIX I've encountered that doesn't handle this format natively. Not only do you need a patch to support it, but you have to mount your CD-ROM with -o rr to read RockRidge extensions.
- Swap volumes/files can not be removed on the fly. HP-UX lets you add a new swap volume or file while the system is running, but to remove it you have to reboot.
- There is no /etc/nsswitch.conf. By default, there is no /etc/nsswitch.conf, and name service switch library uses compiled-in defaults. If you don't want to use the mysterious defaults, just create a file of your own.
- Manual device file creation for LVM. LVM is nice, but when I create a volume group, I really shouldn't have to run mknod myself and stick a device file in /dev/vgxx.
What HP-UX gets right
Believe it or not, I actually do like quite a few things about HP-UX. They are outweighed in importance by the things I don't like, but I list them here nonetheless to prove I'm not just mean.
- Startup/shutdown log. Many times I've watched a Solaris system boot and have seen a startup script print an error message. As soon as I can think, "hey, something's not right," it's off the screen and lost forever. HP-UX saves the output of the startup and shutdown scripts in a /etc/rc.log, so you can investigate any failures later. Don't beat them up about logging to /etc — /var isn't mounted when they need to start writing to the log.
- Startup/shutdown messages are pretty. Instead of showing me stdout/stderr from every startup and shutdown script, HP-UX gives me a one-line summary of each thing it's doing, like "Starting NFS Server," and then either "OK" or "FAIL." This is nice, since some Solaris startup scripts print several lines of output and others print none at all. And since the detailed output is logged elsewhere, I don't lose any information.
- Boot-up can be interrupted. If you're booting HP-UX, and you notice that a critical service failed to start, you can interrupt the boot with control-backslash, get a shell, and debug it immediately, rather than waiting for the system to come all the way up. This is useful when the service you're trying to debug is so critical that you know you'll need to reboot after making the fix anyway.
- /etc/rc.config.d is nice. Most of the configuration of daemons that in Solaris would be done by editing various per-daemon configuration files in /etc is done in HP-UX by editing files in /etc/rc.config.d and setting the values of predefined variables. These files are sourced by the init.d startup scripts, and tell them things like whether an NFS server should start, where's the NTP server, what IP address should an interface have, etc. It's a more consistent interface to the system's configuration.
- Kernel tunables can be set in terms of other tunables. You can choose to set a tunable's value absolutely — say, to 1024 — or in terms of another tunable — for example, to maxuprc * 10. This is pretty nice, since you can edit fewer tunables and have the relative ones scale automatically. This feature was removed in HP-UX 11iv2, though.
- fstab is a better name than vfstab. Sorry, Solaris — /etc/vfstab should be /etc/fstab, because that's what everybody else calls it.
- Patch rating system. Every HP-UX patch has a rating, so you can tell how widely used the patch is and how thoroughly tested it has been.
- Downloaded patches can be bundled into a depot. When you download patches from HP's web site, you have the option of making the patches into a software depot. If you're installing them on multiple systems, this makes it a lot easier than managing all the patches individually.
- Separation of analyze phase from install phase for software/patch installation. HP-UX's software distribution system (SD-UX) separates the analyze phase (checking disk space, checking prerequisites, etc.) from the installation phase when installing patches or software. With a bundle of patches, this can be a big time saver. You can perform the analyze phase for all the patches ahead of time, which won't modify anything on the system, and do the installation phase during your system's maintenance window. In Solaris, patches take a long time to install, and much of the time is spent calculating whether or not the patch should be applied at all.
- The output of ioscan is easier to read than prtconf. If I want to quickly see what devices are attached to the system, HP-UX's ioscan is much easier to read than Solaris' prtconf. Of course, tea leaves are probably easier to read than prtconf, so that's not saying much.
Jun 3, 2008
shlom:
My HPUX (11.23) didn't come with sudo on it.
Is there a reliable source, which I can donwload it from?Go to http://software.hp.com/ and search for sudo. ixSudo one of the bundles available as part of the Internet Express package... just select the one for the OS revision you're running.
Download ixSudo - part of Internet Express package - http://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPUXIEXP1123
1. You dowload only the portions of the Internet Express package that you want. If you just want sudo, then just download ixSudo from the Internet Express download page.
2. Configuration is the same. It's still sudo. HP just built it and packaged it. The only slightly weird thing about it that the sudoers file is actually stored in /opt/iexpress/sudo/etc. There is a symlink, /etc/sudoers, that points to it.
HOUSTON -- Hewlett-Packard will sell its last new AlphaServer system late next month — a plan that has been forcing users of the technology to decide whether to make one last hardware upgrade or move to a new platform.
Martha Roberts, a systems manager at a financial services firm that she asked not be identified, said at the HP Technology Forum last week that her company has opted to stick with AlphaServers for now.
She said the firm recently spent millions of dollars to purchase more than 20 of the systems after determining that it would be more cost-effective to keep running its custom-built applications on the soon-to-be-discontinued hardware and HP’s OpenVMS operating system.
The AlphaServer line is also a proven and reliable technology, Roberts added. The systems were originally developed by the former Digital Equipment Corp. and were acquired by HP when it bought Compaq Computer Corp., which had purchased Digital.
HP, which has ported OpenVMS to its Itanium-based Integrity server line, plans to continue supporting the AlphaServer systems at least until 2011, said Dennis Bak, a product planner in the vendor’s AlphaServer life-cycle management group.
Roberts said the new AlphaServers that her firm bought will be used until the end-of-support date at a minimum and possibly longer. “I’ve got servers that I’m replacing right now that are 14 years old,” she said.
Mike Trimbach, an OpenVMS manager at Computer Sciences Corp. in El Segundo, Calif., runs AlphaServers at a customer site. Trimbach said his client is evaluating whether to upgrade to the latest AlphaServers or switch to the Integrity line. He added that the potential cost of migrating applications will be the deciding issue. “It may be more cost-effective to just go with the last Alpha,” Trimbach said.
After the Oct. 27 cutoff date for AlphaServer orders, users may still be able to get surplus systems from HP or some of its resellers, Bak said. But once sales end, availability will become less certain, he added.
Although HP will continue to develop and support OpenVMS on the Integrity line, the same can’t be said for Tru64 Unix, an operating system that has consistently been praised by users for its clustering and file management capabilities. Several years ago, HP considered moving Tru64’s clustering technology and file system into HP-UX, but the company rejected that idea, in part because doing so would have forced all HP-UX users to upgrade.
Instead, HP has been offering its ServiceGuard fail-over software with HP-UX, along with a file system that was developed by Veritas Software Corp., which is now owned by Symantec Corp.
If a system in a ServiceGuard cluster goes down, its processing workload is shifted to other servers. But each system requires its own copy of HP-UX, which increases management overhead. That isn’t the case with clusters based on Tru64, according to HP.
However, HP officials said at last week’s conference that over time, they expect corporate users to rely more on virtualization technology than on clustering.
Internal pages updates by age: Latest : Past week : Past month : Past year
HP-UX 11i―Value leadership for integrated mission-critical UNIX® virtualization
HP-UX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) HP-UX Software Archive
comp.sys.hp.hpux FAQ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)
HP-UX Administrators Mailing List Archive
Copyright © 1996-2012 by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov. www.softpanorama.org was created as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) in the author free time. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine. This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...
Disclaimer:
Last modified: November 04, 2011