Booting the HP 9000 K class

From: Gunther Schadow <gunther_at_aurora.regenstrief.org>
Date: Sat Mar 22 22:27:28 2003

Hi,

so, I turned on my new HP 9000 K/400 machine. This one is a nice
rack with a Raid array built in and two nice DDS2 drives. Has
2 CPUs (could put in 2 more) chugging at 100 MHz (100 times 2
as fast as that C64 :-), FDDI, Ethernet, SCSI and serial line
MUX. The powercord is a bit short so it didn't reach to my
special receptacle bar behind the VAX 11/780. But easy to
plug in the 4 internal cords separately. Came right up with HP-UX.
It's a nice stand-alone machine, everything right there.

I was wondering if there is some tool in HPUX that show you
the load balancing between the CPUs? On Ultrix there is
something called cpustat(8).

I never really liked HP-UX so well (it brings up mixed memories.)
What other OS would run on this type of machine? NetBSD?
OpenBSD? I can never tell the many different 9000 machines
with all this confusing numbering 9000/400 is an 800 machine
and everything is called 9000 even if very different
architecture. But I am afraid OpenBSD doesn't support it,
right? I'd like to run a Microkernel (Mach) based OS on
it, has anyone experience with the PA-RISC Mach based OSes?

OTOH, I don't want to loose the HP-UX system to fall back
on. Are there free old versions of HP-UX floating around?
I have an HPUX CDROM in the drive, but it is 1 of 2 and
I don't have the other one. And I figure there are licese
keys needed when installing it freshly, right?

Even though this is kind of a nice machine, I don't know where
to house it anymore (DEC stuff is my normal line of business)
So, what do people think of these machines? Are they fashionable?
Are there any fans of those like there are for DEC gear? Anybody
want to trade? An NVAX pedestal?

cheers,
-Gunther
Received on Sat Mar 22 2003 - 22:27:28 GMT