Category Archives: HP-UX system administration

Checking the status of multipathing in 11iv3

A common task in a sysadmin’s life is to assist to the changes which are affecting the SAN network. At smaller organizations it could be that besides the system administrator role you also need to manage the storage side.  So here’s a post which might help you if you need to check the status of [...]

Find out the disk we were booted from – Itanium version

This is an advanced method to determine which disks we were booted from. I already posted a solution here, but it turned out to work only for PA-RISC systems. If you are on Itanium, it is more complicated. With adb on /stand/vmunix it only provides you the minor number of the disk in question. Since [...]

Cheatsheet: EMC Powerpath on HP-UX

The latest 11.31 HP-UX version uses native multipathing with the help of the new IO stack. However if you’re on an older version, it was common along many customers to get a Powerpath license from EMC. It is to be used for building an active/active solution. Now here is a quick’n’short cheatsheet for the most [...]

HP-UX Tunable Maintenance Mode

Hopefully everybody knows about the low quorum boot option, by which one is able to boot the system with a defective boot mirror. Now I will show you another boot option. The tunable maintenance mode is rarely used, but can be useful if you have misconfigured some kernel parameters and you have problems booting the [...]

Interrupting the boot process

If you’ve suspected something in the boot process and don’t want to continue with it, or it just seems to hang, you can press CTRL + / and it just stops and will give you a login prompt. I already mentioned this functionality in one of my earlier posts, but now I wanted to emphasize [...]

Working with configuration files

Not many people knows about the HP-UX tool ch_rc. This is a command line tool for people who are not so familiar with sed (stream editor), awk and pattern matching. SYNOPSIS /usr/sbin/ch_rc -a|-r|-l [-v] [-A] [-R root] [-p {parameter|parameter=value}...] [file...] If you want to query a variable in one of a config file under /etc/rc.config.d, [...]

Mounting ISO images

In an earlier post I wrote how one can create an iso image of a CD/DVD. But without the capability of mounting it, this doesn’t sound as a logic way to backup our set of media. So here’s how it goes: Supported OS version is 11.31, you need to install the following product: ISOIMAGE-ENH … [...]

VxFS ioerror mount option

The ioerror mount option for VxFS filesystems sets the policy how the filesystem should handle I/O errors. There are five policies for handling these errors: disable nodisable wdisable mwdisable mdisable