HP-UX 11i Version 2 System Administration

• Marty Poniatowski
• Prentice Hall
• 0131927590

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I have exactly one HP-UX customer. In the past, I've had a few others now and then, but it has never been one of favorites. The reasons are the same reasons I don't get excited about AIX: they are both too proprietary and have unique administration needs.

But we have to do what we have to do, right? The other way to look at this is that the proprietary extensions enable powerful tools that can make our lives easier. You need a guide to help you get started, though, and that's what this book is.

This isn't about sed and awk and grep. It's not a Unix book. It's specifically about the installation, configuration and administration of HP-UX. If you have been blessed with one of these and are unfamiliar with Unix, you'll need some other more general books to go along with this one.

I had helped with the setup of my client's HP-UX box before I had seen this book; adding some disks to LVM and configuring fbackup for cron backup. That wasn't particularly difficult because I've had experience with LVM before and the man pages for fbackup are adequate. I also configured ssh and Samba, but there's nothing special with HP-UX other than file paths. Still, I'm glad to have this book for future needs. I doubt this client will need to get into the more esoteric features like VPars (virtual machines to isolate users), but I was glad to find a (small) section on kernel configuration and tuning.

Setting up printers had been a little confusing at first. HP-UX has SysV style printing, but their model files are complex. It took a bit of examination to see how I could modify these; this book seems to assume you won't need to and doesn't go into much detail here.

There's quite a bit of coverage of general networking and setting up DNS; I'm not quite sure why as there's really not much HP-UX specific there. Perhaps the author felt he needed to include it for the Windows folks newly charged with administrating HP-UX.

All in all, probably a handy book for the new HP-UX admin. Old hands may not need this; the man pages are likely good enough for any differences they need to know about.