Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!midway!msuinfo!frith.egr.msu.edu!petersor From: petersor@egr.msu.edu (Rick Peterson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: HP-UX features Message-ID: <1991May30.151408.8274@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> Date: 30 May 91 15:14:08 GMT References: <1991May24.152621.9993@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> <5570648@hpfcdc.HP.COM> Sender: news@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu Reply-To: petersor@egr.msu.edu (Rick Peterson) Organization: Michigan State University Lines: 94 Originator: petersor@frith.egr.msu.edu In article <5570648@hpfcdc.HP.COM> dougd@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Doug Drees) writes: >Rick Peterson writes: > >> negotiated with HP. Since then we have regreted the decision due to the >> lack of needed features and difficulty to manage (vs. other UNIX OS's). >> > >I know of a lot of shortcomings in the management of HP-UX. But I would still >like to hear a little more detail on why you say HP-UX is difficult to >manage. > Since we haven't kept a careful log of all of the problems that we have run into, this is in some ways a difficult question to answer. If we thought about it for awhile we could come up with quite a list of problems that we have run into in HP-UX. But, without giving it a lot of thought, here is a small list of problems. 1) disk partitions are needed 2) quotas are needed (but comming in HP-UX 8.0 as I understand it) 3) it would be nice to have long file names be the default 4) on a cluster, cnodes don't reboot after a server crash. This is a real problem since we have many cnodes running off five servers. It's a pain to have to run around and reboot each cnode individually, particularly since some of the machines are locked in offices to which we don't have access. 5) mounting disks via NFS from HP servers does not work particularly well. At one point we had most of our user disks (SCSI) on HP servers which caused each of the servers to crash on at least a daily basis. We have now moved these to a SPARC and everything is just fine. 6) can't boot into single user mode - must boot to multi user mode and then shutdown to single user. Not only is it a nuisance, it is a real problem since users who immediately log into the cnodes very annoyed when we immediately shut the system down again. 7) shutdown often doesn't complete correctly. It often just hangs at some point, generally forcing us into a hard crash of the system. 8) even when shutdown does complete correctly, on reboot it complains that the system was not shutdown properly and fsck has to fix things up. 9) SAM 10) it is almost always a battle to install software. There are several reasons for this. First, all HP software comes in update format which forces the system to be shut down to single user mode in all cases. Second, since HP software comes in update format it is impossible to do anything at all different from the standard install. Third, most software, even from HP, requires much work to get it running under HP-UX. Clearly this may not indicate a problem with HP-UX. However, regardless of what software or what vendor, typically the same package, from the same vendor, for a different UNIX platform will install without problem on the other platforms. I tend to think this points to a problem with HP-UX. 11) management of cnodes is difficult. When an upgrade to HP-UX is done all/most cdf's are lost. There is no convenient way to completely undo a cdf once it exists. Changes to the cnode definitions using SAM is difficult. 12) our HP's tend to crash more frequently/easily than our other UNIX systems. Also, when they do crash, they need to be rebooted manually (rather than doing an auto-reboot). 13) can't put a printer off of a cnode. This seems like an obvious thing to do since a server tends to be locked away in a room where users don't have access, while the cnodes tend to be sitting in offices or in labs. 14) no support in HP-UX for the parallel interface. 15) can't change the broadcast address. 16) can't change/look at ARP entries. 17) there seems to be arbitrary (and small) limits throughout. For example, in archive files, the names of the included files are truncated at 14 (or is it 15) characters. This causes some interesting things to happen when the individual files are extracted again. In the LaserROM software, the list of printers to which you can send output is limited to the first 15 printers available. 18) cluster protocols are HP proprietary, instead of using protocols which are more standard. 19) this really isn't a problem with HP-UX, but rather with HP procedures... notification of bugs and patches is poor. It seems that often when installing additional hardware, only after much grief and many calls to the HP response center do we find out that there is a patch available for the problem we are having. This has even been the case when installing additional hardware/software from HP. I hope this is of help. Rick Peterson petersor@egr.msu.edu College of Engineering (517) 355-7435 Michigan State University Opinions expressed above are mine alone and do not represent the opinions of Michigan State University.