14 ms·

Installing and using HP-UX 9

129 points by TMWNN 1y ago

noisy_boy 1y ago
That VUE environment looks suspiciously similar to CDE which was what I saw on Sun Solaris boxes. Or am I getting confused?
- fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
  The C in CDE is “common” because it was a collaboration between the major Unix vendors on a standard for how Unix desktops worked.
- ch_123 1y ago
  CDE was based heavily on VUE. If you read the CDE source code, you'll find many references to VUE.
TMWNN 1y ago
From the author's Reddit post <https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1ot83o4/you_can_boot_68k_hpux_and_parisc_hpux_from_the/ 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.
spedione 1y ago
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".
- brontitall 1y ago
  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.
  - mesrik 1y ago
    The Berkeley Automounter Suite of Utilities also known as am-utils did similar arch/platform local and remote mount tweaks commonly quite easily. https://www.am-utils.org/ https://www.am-utils.org/ The am-utils "amd" known as its running process current use I don't have much to say as I've not much seen it as at least Linux distros have had autofs-tools quite long time. But -90 something am-utils was the thing we mostly used. Adding: Oh, that made me remember we had then also user mode nfs daemon, which allowed re-exporting remote mounts, which was at times with smaller disks and always looking where to get it more if nothing but temporary storage great help. Current kernel based nfs doesn't support it any more.
chkaloon 1y ago
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
aniou 1y ago
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 https://man.netbsd.org/symlink.7 - section Magic symlinks at very end of manual.
- randrus 1y ago
  I seem to remember something like that in DG/UX too.
mesrik 1y ago
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.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  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.
  - mesrik 1y ago
    HP-UX general support seems it is EOLd by end of this year. Extended, apparently very pricey, support will last till 2028. It would be nice if anyone having still contacts they could ask if HPE would be willing to relax at least parts of HP-UX, like documentation and let achieve.org take them and let us occasionally check things as rererence how it was HP-UX. It would be shame if all that work that they did documents were lost and unavailable general public later on.
pjmlp 1y ago
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.
alias_neo 1y ago
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!
jcarrano 1y ago
I have the HP logic analyzer that runs HP-UX. To me it's crazy that I can connect to it with a 2025 Linux OS and run X11 apps remotely out of the box.
- Gracana 1y ago
  It's too bad they went to Windows later on. Having the Unix environment available makes the older stuff really flexible.
- classichasclass 1y ago
  If it's the model I'm thinking of, it's basically a 9000/712. An easy way to get a PA-RISC workstation from someone who doesn't realize what it actually is. :)
CaseFlatline 1y ago
Oh my! Thanks for the memories - HPUX was my first workstation class unix operating system (sili-g's were too expensive). I remember downloading and compiling gcc on hpux. THe ideas of compiling a compiler with itself blew my mind!
pm215 1y ago
Oh hey, a 9000/340 in the Cambridge area. Almost certainly that originated with the university's Engineering department, who back in the 1990s got rid of a lot of these machines that they had been using as X terminals. My notes say they had six diskless workstations to each server, and kept the monitors to use with the replacement machines, which would explain why this person's 9000/340 has no disk or monitor. Some truly terrible quality pictures of the one I used to own are at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/tiroth/ https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/tiroth... (I have long since disposed of it). Some of the people who got the machines had a play around with getting Linux booting on them. Amazingly some of that code is still in the kernel, eg drivers/net/ethernet/amd/hplance.c so it might even still work ;-)
- thejpster 1y ago
  Mine is labelled "humber" and came from another chiark user ;)
lizknope 1y ago
Did anyone use AFS (Andrew File System)? My university in the 1990's had hundreds of Unix workstations from Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, and Linux. It was all tied together using this so everything felt the same no matter what system you were on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture. https://docs.openafs.org/Reference/1/sys.html https://docs.openafs.org/Reference/1/sys.html https://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/afs/html/subsection7.6.html https://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/afs/html/subsection7.6.... "On an Athena DECstation, it's pmax_ul4; on an Athena RS6000, it's rs_aix31" and so on.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture. This sounds cool, but I've wondered - couldn't you just stick something like export $PATH=/nfs/bin/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m):$PATH in /etc/profile or so? (I'm actually doing something like this myself; I don't (yet) have AFS or NFS strongly in play in my environment, but of all things I've resorted to this trick to pick out binaries in ~/.local/bin when using distrobox, because Alpine and OpenSUSE are not ABI compatible)
  - adamdoran 1y ago
    What's really interesting about @sys is that it supports a search-path at run-time, so the resolution can walk back through a list of target systems to find an available one.
  - eichin 1y ago
    You could do that, but @sys is resolved in the kernel - so you can use it in symlinks and just add .../bin to your path (with bin -> .bindir.@sys ) and thus it works for non path cases too...
throw0101d 1y ago
9.x was released in 1992: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX 11.0 was released in 1997, with latest 11.31 going EOL 2025-12-31.
- claudex 1y ago
  I totally missed the EOL announcement. Not that I use it, but it is one on the few last big proprietary Unix. I thought their will always be enough paying customers to maintain it (even if sold to third party).
  - feisty0630 1y ago
    As soon as Intel killed Itanium, the clock was ticking for HP-UX.
jonathaneunice 1y ago
Context Dependent Filesystems were one of those weird, wonderful experiments in Unix' early days that never ultimately escaped its home world. Every vendor Unix had a few. HP were true engineers in those days, so HP-UX had more than a few. But the general corporate attitude toward sharing and standardization was very different. "We want to be standards-based, but we also need some special sauce to differentiate us from the competition." For example, HP-UX was a BSD-based Unix implementation that tried very very hard to pretend it was UNIX System V (R2/R3). "No, no really! I'm not one of that university kids!" But BSD was a far better foundation, vastly better networking etc., so that's what it was underneath. Unix of the era was billed as a multi-user shared system, but it wasn't always great at that. It desperately lacked much of the quiet robustness and workhorse-ness of the proprietary minicomputer OSs of the day (e.g. VMS, AOS, HP's own MPE). No vendor did more to fill that gap and make multi-workload a workaday reality. HP added a fair-share scheduler (FSS), the first multi-system high availability clustering in Unix (MC/ServiceGuard), and scores of refinements along the way. As a result, in practice HP-UX was admirably hardened, and it ran more users and more concurrent competing jobs per system than any other Unix system could. Often by a wide margin. In ~1995 HP doubled down on FSS with Process Resource Manager (PRM), which could guarantee various "shares" (weighted priorities) of total machine resources. First commercial Unix ancestor to today's containers. In production ~6 years before BSD jails and Virtuozzo, ~10 years before Solaris Zones, ~18 years before Docker/Linux containers, and ~20 or more years before container were mainstream production vehicles. Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers. And thus smaller ability to promote its innovations or be selected because of them. Hat tip to steely-eyed missile man Xuan Bui and the many unsung engineering stars of HP in the Unix era.
- kev009 1y ago
  I would say SunOS (i.e. pre Solaris SysV and not including it) was the quality bearer for UNIX in that era. Particularly once they did the Unified Buffer Cache; HP-UX was never able to accomplish this and it makes it not an ideal file server amongst other problems. HP-UX 10 and 11 progressively imported more SysV code and lost some of the charm that 9.x has. I find AIX to be fascinating. Especially 3.x against contemporaries with its LVM, and a pageable kernel. A lot of people have snap judgements against it because they saw 'smit' but don't really understand anything about it.

129 points by TMWNN 1y ago

That VUE environment looks suspiciously similar to CDE which was what I saw on Sun Solaris boxes. Or am I getting confused?

fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
The C in CDE is “common” because it was a collaboration between the major Unix vendors on a standard for how Unix desktops worked.
ch_123 1y ago
CDE was based heavily on VUE. If you read the CDE source code, you'll find many references to VUE.

TMWNN 1y ago

From the author's Reddit post <https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1ot83o4/you_can_boot_68k_hpux_and_parisc_hpux_from_the/ 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.

spedione 1y ago

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".

brontitall 1y ago
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.
- mesrik 1y ago
  The Berkeley Automounter Suite of Utilities also known as am-utils did similar arch/platform local and remote mount tweaks commonly quite easily. https://www.am-utils.org/ https://www.am-utils.org/ The am-utils "amd" known as its running process current use I don't have much to say as I've not much seen it as at least Linux distros have had autofs-tools quite long time. But -90 something am-utils was the thing we mostly used. Adding: Oh, that made me remember we had then also user mode nfs daemon, which allowed re-exporting remote mounts, which was at times with smaller disks and always looking where to get it more if nothing but temporary storage great help. Current kernel based nfs doesn't support it any more.

chkaloon 1y ago

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

aniou 1y ago

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 https://man.netbsd.org/symlink.7 - section Magic symlinks at very end of manual.

randrus 1y ago
I seem to remember something like that in DG/UX too.

mesrik 1y ago

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.

pjmlp 1y ago
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.
- mesrik 1y ago
  HP-UX general support seems it is EOLd by end of this year. Extended, apparently very pricey, support will last till 2028. It would be nice if anyone having still contacts they could ask if HPE would be willing to relax at least parts of HP-UX, like documentation and let achieve.org take them and let us occasionally check things as rererence how it was HP-UX. It would be shame if all that work that they did documents were lost and unavailable general public later on.

pjmlp 1y ago

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.

alias_neo 1y ago

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!

jcarrano 1y ago

I have the HP logic analyzer that runs HP-UX. To me it's crazy that I can connect to it with a 2025 Linux OS and run X11 apps remotely out of the box.

Gracana 1y ago
It's too bad they went to Windows later on. Having the Unix environment available makes the older stuff really flexible.
classichasclass 1y ago
If it's the model I'm thinking of, it's basically a 9000/712. An easy way to get a PA-RISC workstation from someone who doesn't realize what it actually is. :)

CaseFlatline 1y ago

Oh my! Thanks for the memories - HPUX was my first workstation class unix operating system (sili-g's were too expensive). I remember downloading and compiling gcc on hpux. THe ideas of compiling a compiler with itself blew my mind!

pm215 1y ago

Oh hey, a 9000/340 in the Cambridge area. Almost certainly that originated with the university's Engineering department, who back in the 1990s got rid of a lot of these machines that they had been using as X terminals. My notes say they had six diskless workstations to each server, and kept the monitors to use with the replacement machines, which would explain why this person's 9000/340 has no disk or monitor. Some truly terrible quality pictures of the one I used to own are at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/tiroth/ https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/tiroth... (I have long since disposed of it). Some of the people who got the machines had a play around with getting Linux booting on them. Amazingly some of that code is still in the kernel, eg drivers/net/ethernet/amd/hplance.c so it might even still work ;-)

thejpster 1y ago
Mine is labelled "humber" and came from another chiark user ;)

lizknope 1y ago

Did anyone use AFS (Andrew File System)? My university in the 1990's had hundreds of Unix workstations from Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, and Linux. It was all tied together using this so everything felt the same no matter what system you were on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture. https://docs.openafs.org/Reference/1/sys.html https://docs.openafs.org/Reference/1/sys.html https://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/afs/html/subsection7.6.html https://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/afs/html/subsection7.6.... "On an Athena DECstation, it's pmax_ul4; on an Athena RS6000, it's rs_aix31" and so on.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture. This sounds cool, but I've wondered - couldn't you just stick something like export $PATH=/nfs/bin/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m):$PATH in /etc/profile or so? (I'm actually doing something like this myself; I don't (yet) have AFS or NFS strongly in play in my environment, but of all things I've resorted to this trick to pick out binaries in ~/.local/bin when using distrobox, because Alpine and OpenSUSE are not ABI compatible)
- adamdoran 1y ago
  What's really interesting about @sys is that it supports a search-path at run-time, so the resolution can walk back through a list of target systems to find an available one.
- eichin 1y ago
  You could do that, but @sys is resolved in the kernel - so you can use it in symlinks and just add .../bin to your path (with bin -> .bindir.@sys ) and thus it works for non path cases too...

throw0101d 1y ago

9.x was released in 1992: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX 11.0 was released in 1997, with latest 11.31 going EOL 2025-12-31.

claudex 1y ago
I totally missed the EOL announcement. Not that I use it, but it is one on the few last big proprietary Unix. I thought their will always be enough paying customers to maintain it (even if sold to third party).
- feisty0630 1y ago
  As soon as Intel killed Itanium, the clock was ticking for HP-UX.

jonathaneunice 1y ago

Context Dependent Filesystems were one of those weird, wonderful experiments in Unix' early days that never ultimately escaped its home world. Every vendor Unix had a few. HP were true engineers in those days, so HP-UX had more than a few. But the general corporate attitude toward sharing and standardization was very different. "We want to be standards-based, but we also need some special sauce to differentiate us from the competition." For example, HP-UX was a BSD-based Unix implementation that tried very very hard to pretend it was UNIX System V (R2/R3). "No, no really! I'm not one of that university kids!" But BSD was a far better foundation, vastly better networking etc., so that's what it was underneath. Unix of the era was billed as a multi-user shared system, but it wasn't always great at that. It desperately lacked much of the quiet robustness and workhorse-ness of the proprietary minicomputer OSs of the day (e.g. VMS, AOS, HP's own MPE). No vendor did more to fill that gap and make multi-workload a workaday reality. HP added a fair-share scheduler (FSS), the first multi-system high availability clustering in Unix (MC/ServiceGuard), and scores of refinements along the way. As a result, in practice HP-UX was admirably hardened, and it ran more users and more concurrent competing jobs per system than any other Unix system could. Often by a wide margin. In ~1995 HP doubled down on FSS with Process Resource Manager (PRM), which could guarantee various "shares" (weighted priorities) of total machine resources. First commercial Unix ancestor to today's containers. In production ~6 years before BSD jails and Virtuozzo, ~10 years before Solaris Zones, ~18 years before Docker/Linux containers, and ~20 or more years before container were mainstream production vehicles. Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers. And thus smaller ability to promote its innovations or be selected because of them. Hat tip to steely-eyed missile man Xuan Bui and the many unsung engineering stars of HP in the Unix era.

kev009 1y ago
I would say SunOS (i.e. pre Solaris SysV and not including it) was the quality bearer for UNIX in that era. Particularly once they did the Unified Buffer Cache; HP-UX was never able to accomplish this and it makes it not an ideal file server amongst other problems. HP-UX 10 and 11 progressively imported more SysV code and lost some of the charm that 9.x has. I find AIX to be fascinating. Especially 3.x against contemporaries with its LVM, and a pageable kernel. A lot of people have snap judgements against it because they saw 'smit' but don't really understand anything about it.