Hello all!
I have recently picked up a contract job doing system administration. I was told it was primarily a Linux Red Hat shop but when I started I found out was about 60% HP-UX. I have very little HP-UX experience. I need to get an affordable HP-UX box to learn on. Any suggestions on what would be a good starter system? I do not have a clue on what system to buy. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Chris Edwards
Getting the hardware is no major problem (eBay etc) getting a legal copy of HPUX is more of a problem.
OpenPA: PA-RISC Information Resource is a great resource for hardware information, a minimum suggestion may be a PA-RISC 1.1 system that can run HPUX 11i.
If the site has a number of HP-UX system find the development/test environments and request time on those. A site should have some mechanism to test it's disaster recovery procedures, so it should have systems that can be rebuilt from scratch.
They do have 2 dev boxes but no spares to play with. I was hopeing to get a handle on the boot procedures and such. I have found some cheap machines on Ebay, will something with 400Mhz or faster work to give me a decent machine to learn on?
More than sufficient. I have a lowly 725/100 which happily runs HPUX 11i. Not the fastest but does what I want.
Thanks for the info. The link is great, now i can actually tell what types of systems we are running here at work by running the "model" command and comapring it to the OpenPA website.
It's always a bonus if a contractor can sound like he knows what he is talking about. 
You can get a decent C3600 for a reasonable amount on ebay.
Regarding HP-UX, the product does not require authentication to install, so you can probably just borrow a set of your client's CDs.
Itanium boxes are more difficult, as they've stopped the Itanium workstations so it's servers only (��!).
You'll be looking at 11i v1, as v2 and v3 have a more limited list of supported systems.
Thanks! That exactly what I was looking at on ebay a c3600. I wonder why they don't have a free version like Solaris does.
Unfortunately like I stated, they told me they were a Red Hat shop and they are primarily a HP shop. There are plans to eliminate all of the HP-UX machines but I believe it will take well over a year to remove them from service. The last time I used HP-UX I was in College in 1994, I don't have that good of a memory and it has probably changed alot since then.
Thanks again!
If you are doing admin jobs, use "sam" rather than the command line if you can.