this is just a short note about the hpux box re-installation problems, as an explanation why it took so long.
As polarhome does not have a real data hall the servers are running in over 40 degree C during summer and below minus 10-20 during the winter. Honestly, it is a miracle that the disks survive five ten years.
This disk did not... It was not able to boot any longer and could not spin up at all.
First try: open the disk and with sewing machine fine oil try to improve the rotation.
Works fine sometimes - specially with fans.
It was a challenge to find some up to 4G SCSI disks that could fit into the DEC StorageWorks cabinet... and because could not find any 11.00 install media installed HP-UX 11.11.
The installation went fine, just 11.11 uses more resources and it took few installations while I find out what is the best performance, disk usage, file system management that I have licence for etc.
The choice is a HSF file system with a single partitioned root using the full disk size.... and mount /home from a separate HSF disk. VxFS sounds slightly better but there were licencing problems modifying the volume group.
When I got newly installed system up an running, I was missing the "standard" Unix environment with gcc, mc, bash, vim -as well as ssh, apache web server mysql database.
It is an easy task - using depothelper form http://hpux.connect.org.uk/ just fill up the box.
Unfortunately it is not that simple.
polarhomes model is 9000/712/80 with a PA-RISC1.1 CPU HP-UX archive builds just for PA-RISC2.0 (and for Itanium).
It is weird how the OS informs the user that a correctly installed package with all rights running by root gives an error "Execute permission denied" - it means you are running on not allowed architecture
Read more about here http://eloquence.marxmeier.com/sdb/html/1094155778.html
..and this was an explanation for lot of swinstall related problems too.
I almost give up and put back to production an almost empty box, when after almost a week struggling - decided to give a chance for the dead disk.
Yes.. it was spinning up even if it sounds terrible.
Made an fsck and mounted the old root partition where in the /usr/local/ are the installed 11.00 freeware packages.
Some mangling with symlinks and copying it turned out that the executables work well on 11.11 too.
There might be some problems with libraries, but you need just to recompile your program.
Enjoy
