Installing and using HP-UX 9

This brings back memories of working in the basement of a medical laboratory here in Queensland in the mid 90s. I thought the HP hardware was fine, but as someone who used many different “/UX” operating systems for a living, HP’s was near the bottom of my list. I don’t really remember any details but it was just weird. I didn’t use this cluster file system, but the weirdness certainly tracks.

I do remember that their UUCP implementation included parts from both UUCP distributions. I was like - why? Why has someone gone to the trouble to create this mashup?! It made no sense to me.

I am a bit wistful for the days when there were many Unixes. HP, DG, Sequent, Sun, Fujitsu/ICL, and plenty I never used (AIX, A/UX, SGI and Pyramid come to mind, but there were plenty more). Nobody at the time could have guessed that in a few short years they would all be gone, replaced not by Windows NT - but by Linux.

They use this system even if you don't have a mixed-architecture cluster. There are some config files in /etc where the context is the hostname of the machine that's accessing the file. That way each machine in the cluster can get a unique copy of the config file (like /etc/checklist) whilst they can all share the same copy of some files (like /etc/passwd, which is not a CDF)

wild. I guess the hostname gets bootstrapped by the network boot, and not by an infinite regress of /etc/hostname CDFs.