linux & hp-ux differences?

[Pete Randall]

Stefan,

Good point about Amazon. However, I'll stick to HP-UX for fault tolerance, thankyou.

Another point about Linux: As it has grown in popularity, so have the hacker's exploits of it. It now regularly contends with Microslop for the highest number of reported exploits each week in the SANS Security Consensus. HP-UX, being less widely deployed, is still relatively low on the hacker's target list, thankfully.


Pete

[Ralph Grothe]

First as already mentioned Linux is *free*, not as in "free beer", as the Linux community put it.
Meaning, its greatest pro is not so much the price which unlike seems to have been the main motivation for so many transitions in businesses from other OS, but rather that "the source is always with you".
This is an invaluable advantage, and means provided you have the knowledge and the time that you can fully adapt your OS to your personal needs!
On the other hand, Linux's sources are mainly tied to the ethical GNU GPL which expects that modifications, alterations, and extensions of the sources have to be dsiclosed as well.
To whom this model is too radical still has the choice to go with one of the free BSDs who also come with sources but have a lesser binding BSD license.

I agree that HP-UX has proven its reliability in professional heavy duty.
But you have to aknowledge that Linux was originally designed to run on cheap (mainly Intel) hardware (however this is no longer the only platform).
Of course cheap of the shelf hardware also means a lesser reliability.
Then the Linux OS, driver and application developers have to make their code run on a sheer myriad of mostly no-name hardware.
In this respect it is much easier for HP that exclusively have to service their own made hardware.

Another point worth mentioning is that the main chunk of development still today is done by mostly volunteers who do it as a hobby (or are paid by their employer to have free resources to do so).
This also means a great distributed effort of coding accross the whole globe with participants who may have never personally met before.
This of course can also be the reason for the demise of a software project because people lose either interest or time or are suddenly tied by other circumstance.

Considering all this it seems to me really amazing what has been achieved so far.

Mind you that low cost Linux clusters are about to outperform high cost high end hardware in number crunching applications (e.g. scientific computations).

Btw. LVM has been available in the Linux kernel since 2.4.X.
It is modelled after the HP-UX LVM (almost same commands and syntax).
However Linux LVM mirroring isn't yet available (but software RAID tools are!)

What I like most is Linux's high degree of Kernel modularization.

[Pete Randall]

That same miraculous development model also means that it can take a long time to get drivers developed for the latest hardware, so don't expect that you're going to be able to install Linux on your latest, greatest laptop that you just bought yesterday. The installation and administration of Linux boxes takes (in my opinion) a *lot* more effort than HP-UX. After it's up and running you can pretty much forget about it, as someone else said.


Pete

[Ralph Grothe]

Still felt urged to respond to Pete's hacker issue.

You have to consider that the by now millions of Linux systems are mainly operated by non-professional people of whom many even don't know the basics of networks, protocols, services, system administration etc.
But despite many of them connect to the internet via their ISP while they have services running they will most likely never need because they simply don't know of their existence.
Then they also connect without a firewall or other sound precautions for which Linux has all the tools.

On the other side, who on earth is ever getting his fingers on a HP-UX box?
Mostly I'd bet professionals who have been trained or gained in many years of system administration enough experience, or who even are old time veterans who have grown with Unix and the internet.

Then again, most HP-UX servers are run by companies or institutions who even employ a special firewall dept. or such.
Most of the servers are exclusively in private networks that are never exposed to the threats of the internet.

[Ralph Grothe]

2nd reply to Pete.

Yes it can be pretty daunting to get your latest hardware running on Linux.
But this is hardly ever the blame of the driver developers but rather the consumer market hardware producers who still are mostly ignoramous and only provide drivers for the Windows.
But if this wasn't enough, most developers would volunteer to write the drivers if they were provided with the hundreds of competing similar devices, and worse if they only had a chance to get hw topolgy disclosed at least as much as what is reuired to write a driver.
If these prerequisites are given you can bet that the distributed hacking community is the fastest to provide drivers (often only a matter of days, you have to follow usenet announcements and mailing lists).

As far as documentation and online help (manpages, info pages, howtos, faqs, news groups etc.) is concerned you can find support for almost any issue on the internet.
Not seldom that you have direct contact to the developers who are keen on fixing bugs or extending features if the community of users is sending them feedback.

Apart sound Linux users know that it is almost compulsiory to study the hardware compatibilty lists before buying any piece of hardware.
There is such a hardware howto amongst others available from here:

http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto

Especially for Linux on laptops, as you mentioned it, there is an excellent website where users who themselves have gone through the bleak installation odyssee report what needs to be done to get it running on that special make of laptop:

http://www.linux-laptop.net/

[Andy Beal]

HP-UX is much more mature, especially if your playing in a 64 bit arena. Linux for the Itanium is availiable, but I've never heard of anyone running it production. Big enough applications can call for 64 bit in some situations, read on.

One year ago we deployed Oracle 9i database on a RedHat Advanced server, dual 2.4 Ghz Xeons 4 Gb of memory. After 6 months of pure pain, worry and suffering we moved the whole thing to a rp5470 (dual 64 bit 875Mhz).

Reasons: I had continual VM problems that RedHat as a company wouldn't acknowledge, however thier engineers did. (This is finally fixed! I hope I'm deploying 2 smaller Oracle/Linux installations in the next few weeks)

32bit Linux can only get 1.7Gb of shared memory, severely limiting the amount of users that can be on a single box, especially when your numbers dictate using MTS. There is a Kernel "Hack" availiable to get 2.7 GB out of it, but due to the fragile VM subsystem I'd not recommend it.

Linux is not really a bad OS, just like HP-UX is very flexible and as others pointeed out, very servicable if you like searching google and the Mailing lists. If you doing Oracle and you want a lot of users in the end even oracle admits you better switch to industrial unix. "Oh, when you said 1000 user sessions I didn;t think you really meant 1000." Doh.

Andy

[Trever Furnish]

Were you just trolling to see how much of an OS war you could start? :-)

Implication was made above that comparing hpux and linux means comparing ide and scsi - that's ridiculous. Linux does scsi just fine.

Implication was also made that HPUX is more secure than Linux - I'd have to say that a default redhat install facing the public leaves me feeling a LOT more secure than a default hpux install. HP brags about security, then refuses to stop releasing their OS with improper file permissions all over the place. Their openssh package of all things even includes world writeable files under /opt. Having said that however, I have no doubt that both OSes can be equally secured.

From a practical standpoint, being able to get HP to stand behind hpux is important if you're running critical apps. More important than the technical support is that they provide a scapegoat when things go wrong. :-)

From a management standpoint, hpux (and windows) is leaps and bounds beyond linux - glance is great and third-party apps like Unicenter are able to pull a LOT more data out of hpux than you can find in a month's worth of work in Linux. What process was consuming most of the cpu at 3am? This may be partially because the virtual memory management and scheduling were so in flux during the 2.4 linux kernel series that no one wanted to try hooking into it with a management tool, but it's extremely frustating.

[Michael Steele_2]

Oops, typo under 'LINUX O/S Loaders'

"...You can network boot from 'lilo',..."

should be

"...You CAN'T network boot from 'lilo',..."

(* FLAME ON! *)