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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 wr

by mesrik 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.
  - accrual 11mo ago
    Could it be possible to copy the man pages directly from a running distribution? I'm sure that's not allowed, but if it's otherwise disappearing forever...
    - mesrik 11mo ago
      Sure it is, if you have installation disks. Those are bog std ISO9660 with rock ridge -overlay extension. Which is just hidden file on CD top directory, which maps those silly uppercase ISO naming conventions with file version, and Linux should be able to mount them without problems. I do not remember any more if those man files were preformatted and .Z compressed or were there the troff source files and "an" package also. Commercial unicen did have bad habit not to provide sources, so that could be the case. But if someone have the CD:s then its not too hard to check I believe. Installation files could be packed somehow, like compressed and then cpio or tar inside. That's what I now think those would have been. But I can't remember for sure, its's bit over 25 years when I did work HP-UX last time. And if I remember correctly HP did ship some printed manuals also with CD's. I have some kind of memory seeing some disks like that, but I never used those. We had paper manuals back then and which were then sent to customer as part of our product. Nor have I any idea which format those documents or whole document CD's would be. Postscript or PDF if we would be lucky, but it could be some proprietary format in worst case.
bpoyner 11mo ago
I agree that LVM in HP-UX was far ahead of Linux back in the day. To be fair some of those advanced features in HP-UX LVM required an additional license (eg: mirroring required Enterprise Operating Environment). I haven't touched HP-UX in like 10 years however.
- mesrik 11mo ago
  That is true, sw licenses were a major nuisance. As they usually are. Not just where to get one, but in time, to keep track of those and secure so that proof of purchase was not lost before deployment and include final delivery. HP product codes and major version change product renaming plague were not exactly my favourite part of work! Many HP-UX boxen (servers) came with default (interactive) multiuser OS licenses. Product differentiation which HP sales loved had license castrated workstations, which came only two user license. First time I had no clue about this and were wondering why some odd network management software I was installing a server did not restart properly and was causing head scratching. Then I found that logs stated our license was not valid though it had been confirmed valid in other test install. A HP support guy I knew and saw later told that I had probably to install optional two-user package and then the software will start. Oh, great that it was. But what the heck that two-user license only prevented only two serial line users simultaneously and only systems console was serial that time and everyone else logged in via network. To be sure I made PM check if we still were within license because of that. He told me later yep, no problem there. Just get it done and we're ready deploy it to site.
Y_Y 11mo ago
I very rarely read man pages (similarly gnu info) on Linux nowadays, whoever they're written for isn't me. Superior alternatives: * tldr/tealdeer - usually just a pile of typical usage examples, almost always covers what I want * jfgi because surely someone has tried to do this before and asked about it on an ancient forum * llms - regurgitating the info from above, possibly with the bonus of letting it try a script on a sandbox and then entering a error-confusion loop * source - documentation can be wrong or incomplete, but the source never lies
pmontra 11mo ago
I remember the hours gcc needed to compile itself on those HP servers. We needed it for all the programs that would not compile with HP's cc. We also installed some GNU userland utilities because, as you wrote, they were better than the ones in HP-UX. Those were the years around 1990.
- Zenst 11mo ago
  I did some HP-UX in late 80's, migration of servers across the country for a courrier company from NCR towers to HP servers running HP-UX (sorry don't recall the models of hand). Had fun porting sortware across, a radio system that was unable to test fully unless in the field (which it did first time, which was amazing). Had many good chats with HP engineers back then (we did a large purchase as a global company) and one I still recall was early editions of HP-UX having an error code of 8008, until somebody in senior managment at HP saw it one time (no customer had ever complained apparently about it). I liked HP-UX having previously worked on IBM RT systems running AIX, as well as NCR towers with there more vanilla System V. Though did have SMIT with AIX and SAM with HP-UX for those manual saving moments of ease to fall back on. Though my favourite flabour of unix of that time would be the Pyramid systems dual universe OSx. You could have a BSD or an AT&T enviroment at once, able to use both flavours in scripts by prefixing with bsd or att, to run that command. Don't recall how it handled TERMCAP/TERMINFO of hand (that was always an area of fun back then). Fun times, in the days in which O'Reilly and magazines like Byte or Unix World, were the internet, along with expensive training courses and manuals that you would use and thumb every page of the multi tombed encyclopedic stack they came in. Best C platform for developing that I did use in that era, hands down the VAX under DCL, the profilers etc, pure leaps and joy.
  - palmotea 11mo ago
    > I liked HP-UX having previously worked on IBM RT systems running AIX, as well as NCR towers with there more vanilla System V. There's very little on the internet about those "NCR Towers." > 1987: https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_marries_its_tower_unix_boxes_with_fault_tolerant_9800 https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_marries_its_tower_un...: "Despite abandoning its effort to implement Unix on its NCR 32 chip set, NCR Corp did not abandon its ambition to bring Unix into the mainstream of its mainframe product offerings, and the company yesterday launched a facility whereby its top-end multiprocessor Series 9800 fault-tolerant mainframes can be used as servers to a network of 68020-based Tower Unix supermicros." > 1988: https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_renews_its_tower_unix_family_with_major_enhancements https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_renews_its_tower_uni...: "When you sell as many machines as NCR does with the Tower, you can’t rush to incorporate a new chip as soon as it arrives because there simply aren’t enough chips to meet your needs. Accordingly the new Tower models use the 25MHz 68020 rather than the 68030."

by mesrik 11mo ago

pjmlp 11mo 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 11mo 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.
- accrual 11mo ago
  Could it be possible to copy the man pages directly from a running distribution? I'm sure that's not allowed, but if it's otherwise disappearing forever...
  - mesrik 11mo ago
    Sure it is, if you have installation disks. Those are bog std ISO9660 with rock ridge -overlay extension. Which is just hidden file on CD top directory, which maps those silly uppercase ISO naming conventions with file version, and Linux should be able to mount them without problems. I do not remember any more if those man files were preformatted and .Z compressed or were there the troff source files and "an" package also. Commercial unicen did have bad habit not to provide sources, so that could be the case. But if someone have the CD:s then its not too hard to check I believe. Installation files could be packed somehow, like compressed and then cpio or tar inside. That's what I now think those would have been. But I can't remember for sure, its's bit over 25 years when I did work HP-UX last time. And if I remember correctly HP did ship some printed manuals also with CD's. I have some kind of memory seeing some disks like that, but I never used those. We had paper manuals back then and which were then sent to customer as part of our product. Nor have I any idea which format those documents or whole document CD's would be. Postscript or PDF if we would be lucky, but it could be some proprietary format in worst case.

bpoyner 11mo ago

I agree that LVM in HP-UX was far ahead of Linux back in the day. To be fair some of those advanced features in HP-UX LVM required an additional license (eg: mirroring required Enterprise Operating Environment). I haven't touched HP-UX in like 10 years however.

mesrik 11mo ago
That is true, sw licenses were a major nuisance. As they usually are. Not just where to get one, but in time, to keep track of those and secure so that proof of purchase was not lost before deployment and include final delivery. HP product codes and major version change product renaming plague were not exactly my favourite part of work! Many HP-UX boxen (servers) came with default (interactive) multiuser OS licenses. Product differentiation which HP sales loved had license castrated workstations, which came only two user license. First time I had no clue about this and were wondering why some odd network management software I was installing a server did not restart properly and was causing head scratching. Then I found that logs stated our license was not valid though it had been confirmed valid in other test install. A HP support guy I knew and saw later told that I had probably to install optional two-user package and then the software will start. Oh, great that it was. But what the heck that two-user license only prevented only two serial line users simultaneously and only systems console was serial that time and everyone else logged in via network. To be sure I made PM check if we still were within license because of that. He told me later yep, no problem there. Just get it done and we're ready deploy it to site.

Y_Y 11mo ago

I very rarely read man pages (similarly gnu info) on Linux nowadays, whoever they're written for isn't me. Superior alternatives: * tldr/tealdeer - usually just a pile of typical usage examples, almost always covers what I want * jfgi because surely someone has tried to do this before and asked about it on an ancient forum * llms - regurgitating the info from above, possibly with the bonus of letting it try a script on a sandbox and then entering a error-confusion loop * source - documentation can be wrong or incomplete, but the source never lies

pmontra 11mo ago

I remember the hours gcc needed to compile itself on those HP servers. We needed it for all the programs that would not compile with HP's cc. We also installed some GNU userland utilities because, as you wrote, they were better than the ones in HP-UX. Those were the years around 1990.

Zenst 11mo ago
I did some HP-UX in late 80's, migration of servers across the country for a courrier company from NCR towers to HP servers running HP-UX (sorry don't recall the models of hand). Had fun porting sortware across, a radio system that was unable to test fully unless in the field (which it did first time, which was amazing). Had many good chats with HP engineers back then (we did a large purchase as a global company) and one I still recall was early editions of HP-UX having an error code of 8008, until somebody in senior managment at HP saw it one time (no customer had ever complained apparently about it). I liked HP-UX having previously worked on IBM RT systems running AIX, as well as NCR towers with there more vanilla System V. Though did have SMIT with AIX and SAM with HP-UX for those manual saving moments of ease to fall back on. Though my favourite flabour of unix of that time would be the Pyramid systems dual universe OSx. You could have a BSD or an AT&T enviroment at once, able to use both flavours in scripts by prefixing with bsd or att, to run that command. Don't recall how it handled TERMCAP/TERMINFO of hand (that was always an area of fun back then). Fun times, in the days in which O'Reilly and magazines like Byte or Unix World, were the internet, along with expensive training courses and manuals that you would use and thumb every page of the multi tombed encyclopedic stack they came in. Best C platform for developing that I did use in that era, hands down the VAX under DCL, the profilers etc, pure leaps and joy.
- palmotea 11mo ago
  > I liked HP-UX having previously worked on IBM RT systems running AIX, as well as NCR towers with there more vanilla System V. There's very little on the internet about those "NCR Towers." > 1987: https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_marries_its_tower_unix_boxes_with_fault_tolerant_9800 https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_marries_its_tower_un...: "Despite abandoning its effort to implement Unix on its NCR 32 chip set, NCR Corp did not abandon its ambition to bring Unix into the mainstream of its mainframe product offerings, and the company yesterday launched a facility whereby its top-end multiprocessor Series 9800 fault-tolerant mainframes can be used as servers to a network of 68020-based Tower Unix supermicros." > 1988: https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_renews_its_tower_unix_family_with_major_enhancements https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_renews_its_tower_uni...: "When you sell as many machines as NCR does with the Tower, you can’t rush to incorporate a new chip as soon as it arrives because there simply aren’t enough chips to meet your needs. Accordingly the new Tower models use the 25MHz 68020 rather than the 68030."