[buug] HPUX

Wed Nov 9 16:43:00 PST 2005

Thanks for the quick response.  It appears that I have been limited myself because of familiarity.  It also sounds as if I need to become acquainted with other flavors of Unix, i.e. Linux, etc. All good information to know when returning to the work force.  Now I can start.

Thanks!
Michelle

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: HP Unix Workstation (Brian Dessent)
2. Re: HP Unix Workstation & UNIX, etc. practice (Michael Paoli)
3. Re: HP-UX on x86 (Michael Paoli)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:02:26 -0800
From: Brian Dessent 

Subject: Re: [buug] HP Unix Workstation
To: Shaw Vrana 
Cc: Michelle , buug at weak.org
Message-ID: <43712072.5CE52AA7 at dessent.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Shaw Vrana wrote:

> > 1. Brush up on my old skills, i.e. shell scripting, line command, file
> > and disk manipulation, etc. Basic admin stuff and I want to run my own
> > web server which includes cgi/perl scripting.
> 
> Do you have a particular interest in HPUX? If not, you could easily get
> an old Intel box and install a version of GNU/Linux or *BSD on it. This
> would probably be the cheapest option as just about any box would do and
> you'd have access to a widely used, enterprise-level Unix-like system.
> Perhaps even easiest, would be to boot your current machine from a
> bootable Linux distribution like Knoppix or Ubuntu.

Or, take the money you would have spent on the hardware at ebay and buy
a copy of VMware. Then install images of CentOS, Suse, Fedora, Gentoo,
Mandriva, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris x86, and Darwin x86. The
breadth you would get from being familiar with all of those seems to me
like it would be a lot more valuable than the depth of knowing one
certain flavor of a proprietary unix.

Brian

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 23:02:57 -0800
From: Michael Paoli 
Subject: [buug] Re: HP Unix Workstation & UNIX, etc. practice
To: Michelle 
Cc: buug at weak.org
Message-ID: <1131519777.43719f214f9dc at webmail.rawbw.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

HP-UX is by no means dead, but it's not exactly one of the fastest
growing, or comparatively fastest growing areas, in the
UNIX/LINUX/BSD/... realm.

Short of needing to directly run HP-UX on your own hardware, or
similarly for AIX and SPARC (but not x86) Solaris, you should be able
to run pretty much any major relatively "surviving" distribution/flavor
on some reasonable x86 hardware. E.g. that would cover:
major LINUX distributions
major BSD distributions
Solaris x86
and "only" miss HP-UX and AIX.
Tru64 is on an HP-UX convergent path, SGI appears to be rapidly fading
(may be subsumed into something else). Is there anything else?
(They're SCO, but they're pretty minor these days, and likely to eat
themselves into non-existence, or be eaten by their lawyer bills, or
otherwise just fade away or be consumed or subsumed).

For those other platforms (e.g. HP-UX, AIX, SPARC Solaris (mostly like
x86 Solaris, except some of the lower level details)), you might also
look into volunteer opportunities, internships, etc. If you can't find
opportunity to practice on the systems, there are newsgroups and
mailing lists. Try to read all the questions and figure out the
answers, and read all the "answers" too, for the useful but unexpected
stuff (like practical advice how vendor X's utility Y sucks, doesn't
behave as documented, generally blows up, and to effectively work
around it, one should generally Z).

There are also freely available UNIX accounts of various flavors to be
had out on the Internet - typically they won't give you superuser
(root) access to practice doing systems administration, but you might
be quite able to practice shell scripting, various command line stuff,
perhaps some other programming stuff, etc.

references/excerpts:
Quite dated materials, but some of it still useful:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000311200952/www.crl.com/~michaelp/unix/free_and_frugal_unix_starts.html
Free shell accounts:
http://m-net.arbornet.org/
Apparently lots more free shell acounts out there:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22free+shell+accounts%22+bsd+OR+unix+OR+linux&btnG=Google+Search
Volunteer opportunities, e.g.:
http://www.volunteermatch.org/
http://www.compumentor.org/
(some of them have sucky search capabilties, a reasonable search engine can
help a lot in that regard, e.g.:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Avolunteermatch.org+unix+OR+%22hp-ux%22+OR+%22bsd%22+OR+linux+OR+solaris&btnG=Google+Search
)

Quoting Michelle :
> I need a little help. I am a former Unix Admin who has been out of the game
> for a few years. I am looking to return to the field, but want to brush up
> on old skills. I would like to purchase a HP Unix workstation for my home,
> but I don't have the first clue what is or isn't good. I am hoping some of
> you can give me some ideas on what to purchase. I have gone to a number of
> refurbished HP UNIX boxes web sites, but again what to buy, what to buy. 
> Here is what I am looking to do to start:
> 1. Brush up on my old skills, i.e. shell scripting, line command, file and
> disk manipulation, etc. Basic admin stuff and I want to run my own web
> server which includes cgi/perl scripting.

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 07:30:01 -0800
From: Michael Paoli 
Subject: [buug] Re: HP-UX on x86
To: Michelle 
Cc: buug at weak.org
Message-ID: <1131550201.437215f94c5a5 at webmail.rawbw.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

P.S.

Ah, ... I haven't been following it quite closely enough, ...
Sufficiently recent versions of HP-UX also run on sufficiently
supported x86 hardware, e.g. HP-UX 11i v2 on Hewlett-Packard
Integrity series servers using Intel Itanium 2 processors.
Not something likely to be found inexpensively on eBay, though.
Of course those can run LINUX too (can we say "transition strategy"?).

references/excerpts:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12079_div/12079_div.HTML
http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/integrity/index.html
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/5983-0162EN.pdf
http://www.weak.org/pipermail/buug/2005-November/002781.html

Quoting Michael Paoli:

> HP-UX is by no means dead, but it's not exactly one of the fastest
> growing, or comparatively fastest growing areas, in the
> UNIX/LINUX/BSD/... realm.
> 
> Short of needing to directly run HP-UX on your own hardware, or
> similarly for AIX and SPARC (but not x86) Solaris, you should be able
> to run pretty much any major relatively "surviving" distribution/flavor
> on some reasonable x86 hardware. E.g. that would cover:

------------------------------

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