My first thought, upon reading that these were being given away, and seeing "Cambridge" was that they should go to the "Centre for Computing History".
I've been trying to visit this place with my daughter for 4 (or more?) years now, every time we've been in the area (roughly once per year), I forget that it isn't open on Mondays (which is the day we typically have a couple of hours before leaving the area), walk up to the doors only to realise (again) I've made the same mistake, and my daughter and I walk away disappointed.
IMHO, HP-UX had hands down best written man pages I've ever seen any UNIX commercial or free. And I've been working quite many with.
All man pages were well written, nicely formatted easy to read and almost all came with often valuable examples giving quick enough understanding to check usage most often. That has been absolutely the thing that I've missed other *nix systems since.
But there are too many things were done so nicely and made it nice to maintain with HP-UX that it's not worth trying to remember and list all. But unfortunately shell environment was not match to convenience GNU tools Linux had from beginning. That is without making effort to install (read: compile from source for quite long time) those HP-UX if that was allowed. With university computing center that no problem, but telco side it was big nono -- not without getting product owner permission first :/
But just an example Ignite-UX was one of my favourites with HP-UX. The simplicity using a one simple command with few options bootable DAT tape that could then be used to either recover whole running fully functional system or clone that developed system first to staging lab and then up to production with ease was great time saver major upgrades and migrations. None of the Linux bare metal backup systems I've tested have been able to recover exactly same disk layouts, usually LVM part is poorly done. As has been VmWare p2v migration tools also btw.
That Linux LVM that Sistina did first before Red Hat bought them, is implemented quite exactly what HP-UX had for some time then.
My significant experiences on HP-UX were HP Vault, one the very first approaches of doing containers in UNIX, and going through 32 bit to 64 bit transition.
Thanks for this. Brings back so many memories of the long hours spent in computer rooms with HP 9000s and RS/6000s back in the 90s. Seeing that SAM interface made me shiver :)
It's great that there are folks like you preserving this history
Nowadays NetBSD offers something similar to "context depended filesystem", i.e. a special form of symbolic links that can points to different locations, according to wide range set of attributes: from domainname via machine_arch to gid.
The "context dependent filesystem" concept is a bit trippy, but I think it's a pretty neat solution to "some systems need a their own version of a file, other files ought to be universal".
It reminds me a little of a thing used in clustering of DECs (later HPs) Tru64 Unix.
The clusters had a shared OS image - that is a single, shared root filesystem for all members. To allow node-specific config files, there was a type of symbolic link called a “Context Dependent Symbolic Link” (CDSL). They were just like a normal symlink, but had a `{memb}` component in the target, which was resolved at runtime to the member ID of the current system. These would be used to resolve to a path under `/cluster/members/{memb}`, so each host could have its own version of a config file.
The single shared root filesystem made upgrades and patching of the OS extra fun. There was a multi-phase process where both old and new copies of files were present and hosts were rebooted one at a time, switching from the old to the new OS.
>I’ve got my HP 9000 Model 340 booting over the network from an HP 9000 Model 705 in Cluster Server mode and I’ve learned some very unsettling things about HP-UX and its filesystem.
>Boot-up video at the end of the blog, where I play a bit of the original version of Columns.
My first thought, upon reading that these were being given away, and seeing "Cambridge" was that they should go to the "Centre for Computing History".
I've been trying to visit this place with my daughter for 4 (or more?) years now, every time we've been in the area (roughly once per year), I forget that it isn't open on Mondays (which is the day we typically have a couple of hours before leaving the area), walk up to the doors only to realise (again) I've made the same mistake, and my daughter and I walk away disappointed.
We'll make it one day!
IMHO, HP-UX had hands down best written man pages I've ever seen any UNIX commercial or free. And I've been working quite many with.
All man pages were well written, nicely formatted easy to read and almost all came with often valuable examples giving quick enough understanding to check usage most often. That has been absolutely the thing that I've missed other *nix systems since.
But there are too many things were done so nicely and made it nice to maintain with HP-UX that it's not worth trying to remember and list all. But unfortunately shell environment was not match to convenience GNU tools Linux had from beginning. That is without making effort to install (read: compile from source for quite long time) those HP-UX if that was allowed. With university computing center that no problem, but telco side it was big nono -- not without getting product owner permission first :/
But just an example Ignite-UX was one of my favourites with HP-UX. The simplicity using a one simple command with few options bootable DAT tape that could then be used to either recover whole running fully functional system or clone that developed system first to staging lab and then up to production with ease was great time saver major upgrades and migrations. None of the Linux bare metal backup systems I've tested have been able to recover exactly same disk layouts, usually LVM part is poorly done. As has been VmWare p2v migration tools also btw.
That Linux LVM that Sistina did first before Red Hat bought them, is implemented quite exactly what HP-UX had for some time then.
And documentation, apparently no longer to be found on public HP sites, after all their reboots as companies.
Occasionally I find some stuff via search engine, mostly random.
I used the versions 10 and 11.
My significant experiences on HP-UX were HP Vault, one the very first approaches of doing containers in UNIX, and going through 32 bit to 64 bit transition.
Thanks for this. Brings back so many memories of the long hours spent in computer rooms with HP 9000s and RS/6000s back in the 90s. Seeing that SAM interface made me shiver :)
It's great that there are folks like you preserving this history
Nowadays NetBSD offers something similar to "context depended filesystem", i.e. a special form of symbolic links that can points to different locations, according to wide range set of attributes: from domainname via machine_arch to gid.
For details see https://man.netbsd.org/symlink.7 - section Magic symlinks at very end of manual.
The "context dependent filesystem" concept is a bit trippy, but I think it's a pretty neat solution to "some systems need a their own version of a file, other files ought to be universal".
It reminds me a little of a thing used in clustering of DECs (later HPs) Tru64 Unix.
The clusters had a shared OS image - that is a single, shared root filesystem for all members. To allow node-specific config files, there was a type of symbolic link called a “Context Dependent Symbolic Link” (CDSL). They were just like a normal symlink, but had a `{memb}` component in the target, which was resolved at runtime to the member ID of the current system. These would be used to resolve to a path under `/cluster/members/{memb}`, so each host could have its own version of a config file.
The single shared root filesystem made upgrades and patching of the OS extra fun. There was a multi-phase process where both old and new copies of files were present and hosts were rebooted one at a time, switching from the old to the new OS.
From the author's Reddit post <https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1ot83o4/y...>:
>I’ve got my HP 9000 Model 340 booting over the network from an HP 9000 Model 705 in Cluster Server mode and I’ve learned some very unsettling things about HP-UX and its filesystem.
>Boot-up video at the end of the blog, where I play a bit of the original version of Columns.