HP-UX 11i Version 2 System Administration: HP Integrity and HP 9000 Servers - Softcover

Poniatowski, Marty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0131927590 ISBN 13: 9780131927599

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2011

Synopsis

This is the definitive guide to installing and administering HP-UX 11i Version 2 in any environment, on both HP 9000 and HP Integrity server families. Drawing on 18 years of on-site HP-UX consulting experience, Marty Poniatowski offers unparalleled practical insight into running HP-UX 11i efficiently and reliably, illuminating features even experienced HP-UX sysadmins find confusing. Poniatowski organizes this book around your day-to-day needs and your system's lifecycle. He begins with in-depth coverage of installation and bootup, then walks through everything from LVM and kernel configuration through networking. He especially focuses on the capabilities and tools that make HP-UX unique-and how you can use them to save time and money.

About this title

About the Author:

Marty Poniatowski has been a Solution Architect with Hewlett-Packard Company for 18 years in the New York area. He has worked with hundreds of Hewlett-Packard customers in many industries, including media and entertainment, consulting, Internet startups, financial services, and manufacturing.

Marty has been widely published in computer-industry trade publications. He has published more than 50 articles on various computer-related topics. In addition to this book, he is the author of 13 other Prentice Hall books. Marty holds an M.S. in Information Systems from Polytechnic University (Brooklyn, NY), an M.S. in Management Engineering from the University of Bridgeport (Bridgeport, CT), and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Roger Williams University (Bristol, RI).

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Preface to Springboard into Windows XP with Service Pack 2

PREFACE

About The Book

HP-UX 11i System Administration Handbook covers HP-UX for both Intel® Itanium®servers, called Integrity Servers, and Precision Architecture (PARISC) servers, called the HP 9000 Servers. There were different versions of HP-UX that ran on HP Integrity and HP 9000 server families in the past but now HP-UX 11i version 2 runs on both server families, that is, the same source code base is used for both server families. Many differences exist between version 1 and version 2 such as commands used to configure the kernel. The following is a partial list of features of version 2, some of which are comparisons to version 1, that are important to the operation of HP-UX 11i. Keep in mind that this list is being enhanced continuously and that these are some features available at the time of this writing:

Version 2 Update 2 Features

• 1 to 128-way processor scalability under the same operating system.

• Huge file system size of 32 TB, file size of 2 TB, and many other advanced file system-related features.

• Up to four different 64-bit operating systems can run simultaneously on the same HP Integrity Server including HP-UX 11i (which is covered extensively throughout this book), Windows Server 2003 and Linux (which are covered in Chapter xyz), and OpenVMS.

• Multi-operating-system management with HP System Insight Manager (HP SIM) covered in Chapter 11.

• Electrically isolated hard partitions (nPartitions) covered in Chapter 17.

• Virtual Partitions (vPars) that provide full software isolation covered in Chapter 16.

• In-chassis upgrade from PA-RISC to Itanium with version 2 being the same source code base for both architectures.

• ServiceGuard support for mixed environments with both HP Integrity and HP 9000 Servers.

• Instant Capacity On-Demand (iCOD) and numerous variants of iCOD.

• Substantial performance increase of version 2 over version 1.

This is only a partial list of the many advanced features of HP-UX 11i.

HP-UX has come a long way since the early days of the operating system. The speed of the operating system has increased along with the speed of the hardware. Functionality such has both hard and soft partitions and manageability with HP SIM has changed the way that systems are laid-out and managed.

For enterprise applications HP-UX has truely reached the level of a fully functional data center operating system that can run any application vital to the operation of a business.

I crafted this book in such as a way that the major HP-UX topics are covered in such a way to help you get up-and-running quickly using some of of HP-UX’s advanced features such as partitioning.

The book starts out with extensive coverage of booting HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers. Much of the firmware related to booting differs on these two server families so I cover booting these systems in detail in Chapters 1 and 2 for Integrity and HP 9000 respectively. The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is an important part of booting HP Integrity servers, which can run different operating systems in different partitions, so I spend a significant amount of time covering this topic in Chapter 1.

There are many new functions in HP-UX 11i version 2 that have been introduced and have become mainstream since the previous revision of this book was introduced. Most HP-UX installations now make liberal use of Virtual Partitions (vPars) and hard partitions (called Node Partitions or nPartitions). I cover these technologies extensively in the book since this is currently the most sought after topic related to HP-UX. Many other topics are covered in additional chaptersas you would expect in one of my HP-UX system adminstration books.

I hope you enjoy reading the book and learning the material as much as I did writing it.

Marty Poniatowski
marty.poniatowski@hp.com

Relevant URLs

There are many Web sites that can assist you in your HP-UX system administration endeavors. I have listed some of the more prominent HP-UX-related Web sites below as they existed at the time of this writing:

HP Developer and Solution Partner Portal (DSPP). This is a web site that has a lot of good software developer information and tools such as the Software Transition Kit (STK). You can download the STK to test your application when moving from one revision of HP-UX to another.
http://www.hp.com/dspp

The Extended Firmware Interface (EFI). This is firmware on Itaniumbased systems that sits between the operating system and platform firmware:
http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/index.htm

IT Resource Center (ITRC) has valuable hardware, software, network, and other kinds of information for HP system administrators:
http://www.itrc.com

Technical documentation, including most all HP-UX documents:
http://www.docs.hp.com

Software depot home page for HP:
http://www.software.hp.com

HP Education Web Site
http://www.education.hp.com

vPar product information:
http://www.hp.com/go/servicecontrol

HP-UX documentation:
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/

Instant Capacity on Demand (iCOD):
http://www.hp.com/go/icod

The International Association of HP Computing Professionals:
http://www.interex.org

Information on Intel’s Itanium Processor:
http://www.hp.com/go/itanium

Register name servers at:
http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html

Excellent unsupported system administration scripts at:
ftp://contrib:9unsupp8@hprc.external.hp.com/sysadmin/

Ximian GNOME on HP-UX:
http://www.hp.com/workstations/support/software/hpux/gnome/index.html

Open Source and Other Sites of Interest

Information on Perl, including sites to download Perl:
http://www.perl.com

The Perl Journal:
http://www.tpj.com

Information about the GNOME desktop environment:
http://www.gnome.org

Public-domain software that has been ported to HP-UX:
http://hpux.connect.org.uk

Site devoted to managing and promoting open source:
http://www.opensource.org

Linux documentation site:
http://www.linuxdoc.org

Acknowledgments

There were too many people involved in helping me with this book to list each and every one. I have, therefore, decided to formally thank those who wrote sections of the book and those who took time to review it. I’m still not sure whether it takes more time to write something or review something that has been written to ensure that it is correct.

The Author: Marty Poniatowski

Marty has been a Solution Architect with Hewlett-Packard Company for eighteen years in the New York area. He has worked with hundreds of Hewlett Packard customers in many industries, including media and entertainmet, consulting, Internet startups, financial services, and manufacturing.

Marty has been widely published in computer industry trade publications. He has published over 50 articles on various computer-related topics. In addition to this book, he is the author of thirteen other Prentice Hall books: Marty holds an M.S. in Information Systems from Polytechnic University (Brooklyn, NY), an M.S. in Management Engineering from the University of Bridgeport (Bridgeport, CT), and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Roger Williams University (Bristol, RI).

Martin Whittaker

Martin Whittaker is the Director of System Software Engineering in the Enterprise Unix Division (EUD) of Hewlett-Packard. Martin is responsible for the core kernel, commands and libraries in the HP-UX operating system and for HP-UX performance & scalability, Linux affinity, and ISV enablement.

Martin has been with Hewlett-Packard for over twenty years in a variety of senior technical and management positions in areas including mass storage, Itanium architecture, x86 server performance, I/O systems, the 5Nines:5Minutes high availability program, and operating systems.

He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Nottingham in England and a Master's degree in Microprocessor Engineering and Digital Electronics from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in England.

Steven M. Wolff

Steven supplied the tear-out card for this book.

Steven came to HP as a result of HP’s acquisition of Convex. He has been supporting High End Servers since 1989. He is currently in the Remote/E-Delivery Organization working for the Superdome Support Team supporting North American Superdome Customers. Steven is also a certified HP-UX System Administrator and is Linux Professional Institute (LPI) Certified.

Brian Hackley

Brian supplied material on DNS and BIND, NFS Performance Assessment, and NIS background used in various sections throughout the book. Brian is a member of the Hewlett Packard Global Customer Solution Center UNIX Network Team (NETUX.)

Brian came to Hewlett Packard as a result of the HP-Apollo merger in 1989. Until 1993, he was an Offline Technical Marketing Support Engineer, responsible for New Product Introduction for Apollo Domain/OS and HPUX network products. Brian moved into the Chelmsford Response Center in 1993, where he worked as a Senior NETUX Engineer supporting Apollo and HP Network products. After a 2-year hiatus at Sun Microsystems in 1995 and 1996, he returned to HP and re-joined the HP Customer Solution Center NETUX Team in early 1997. Assignments since that time include a variety of roles supporting HP-UX Network Products as a Senior Support Engineer and as a Support Consultant for Mission Critical customers.

Brian lives and works in Lexington Massachusetts, and is married to Wendy Carter, a Registered Pharmacist. They have a son Steve who is an IT Director at the BPS Center in Birmingham, Michigan.

Reviewers and Other Contributors

In all there were about 25 reviewers and additional contributors to this book. I’m not sure what makes someone agree to review a book. You don’t get the glory of a contributing author, but it is just as much work. I would like to thank the many people who devoted a substantial amount of time to reviewing this book to ensure that I included topics important to new system administrators and covered those topics accurately.

Among the additional contributors and reviewers who agreed to help me are Joe Lucas (operating environments,) Claudia Peters and Paul Vetter (HP SIM,) Steven Roth (kernel,) Bruce Henderson (patch,) Aparna Das-Caro, Wade Satterfield, Gary Thomsen, and Erik Bostrom (SAM,) David Soper and Adam Schwartz (EFI,) Myron Stowe (booting,) and Alan Hymes (vPars. chapter and the vPars portion of the Startup chapter.)

Several Prentice Hall reviewers who scoured the entire manuscript are Marty Paul, Tracy Hendler, Rick DeAngelis, Edward Karasinski and Sree Grish.

Conventions Used in this Book

I don’t use a lot of complex notations in the book. Here are a few simple conventions I’ve used to make the examples clear and the text easy to follow:

$ and #	The HP-UX command prompt. Every command issued in the book is preceded by a command prompt. Either one of these two will be used or a system name are usually used as prompts.
italics	Italics are used for variable values and when referring to functional areas and menu picks in the System Administration Manager (SAM).
bold and " "	Bold text is the information you would type, such as the command you issue after a prompt or the information you type when running a script. Sometimes information you would type is also referred to in the text explaining it, and the typed information may appear in quotes.
<---	When selections have to be made, this convention indicates the one chosen for the purposes of the example.
	Brackets indicate optional items and command descriptions.
{ }	Curly braces indicate a list from which you must choose.
	A vertical bar separates items in a list of choices.
	Indicates the "Enter" key has been pressed on the keyboard. Sometimes is used to indicate the return key has been pressed.

One additional convention is that used for command formats. I don’t use command formats more than I have to because I could never do as thorough a job of describing commands as the HP-UX manual pages. The manual pages go into detail on all HP-UX commands. Here is the format I use when I cover commands:

form 1 command option(s) arg(s) form 2 command option(s) arg(s) form n command option(s) arg(s)

I try not to get carried away with detail when covering a command, but there are sometimes many components that must be covered in order to understand a command. Here is a brief description of the components listed above:

form # -There are sometimes many forms of a command. If there is more than one form of a command that requires explanation, then I will show more than one form.

command - The name of the executable.

option(s) - Several options may appear across a command line.

cmd_arg(s) - Command arguments such as path name.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0131927590
• ISBN 13: 9780131927599
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 672