HP-UX and other o.s.

[manfred unterkircher]

Hi all.

I'm relatively new at hp-ux. In the past I had the opportunity to familiarize myself with other Unix flavours (such as Solaris, Aix and Linux).

I don't know if this is the correct place to ask such a question, but I would like to know what are the main differences between these o.s.

I know this sound a bit generic, all I want to get is a piece of advice (that is, if I had to recommend one of the o.s. below:

- HP-UX
- Linux
_ Solaris
- AIX

Which one is worth to choose, particularly as far as future perspective is concerned?

Many thanks

Manfred

[Pete Randall]

Manfred,

That's an interesting question to ask in a HP-UX forum. I wonder what the answer will be???

In my own opinion, HP-UX wins, hands down!


Pete

[Steven E. Protter]

Remember Mr. Scott from the Enterprise?

"The right tool for the right job"

HP-UX which I know well is an industrial strength, highly scalable proprietary OS. You won't be re-writing OS componenents there. You will get great reliabilty. ]

The hardware it runs in is expensive but built like an Abrams tank. Its very good for high stress high availability applications.

Linux, which I've used for years and run a webhosting business on, is not quite up to the HP-UX standard. Its good, eminently patchable, and ships more secure than HP-UX.

When the project can't afford PA-RISC or expensive Itanium hardware, Linux is a good alternative. With LVM its a good option.

Solaris is the market share leader. I know little else about it, though I have some stick time as an admin. AIX, I know nothing about.

SEP

[MarkSyder]

Hi Manfred,

I have nine months' HP-UX experience, having previously used AIX for several years.

Admittedly, I wasn't using the most up-to-date version of AIX, so it may not be a fair comparison, but I find HP-UX much more user-friendly.

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Patrick Wallek]

Manfred,

I think you are going to find a big bias towards HP-UX in this forum. I have worked with Solaris and AIX in addition to HP-UX and I like HP-UX the best. I think it is easier to do a lot of sys admin tasks in HP-UX than it is in Solaris or AIX. HP has some great tools, some of which are FREE like Ignite/UX, and the support from HP is generally pretty good.

As far as the future goes, I think HP is pretty committed to HP-UX especially with regards to running it on the Itanium processors. The PA-RISC lifetime is limited (maybe another 5 years or so for HP manufacturing PA RISC processors -- support will be around long after that) so we will all be forced to Itanium eventually.

I would always recommend HP-UX unless an application forces me to something else.

[RAC_1]

HP-UX, because I love it and love working on it.

[Mark Grant · Accepted solution]

This will be a personal opinion but I have used all of these operating systems for some time. Everyone will have their own ideas.

Linux, linux, linux everywhere! This is the fun operating system and is getting better and better all the time. However, it is really only on the x86 architecture that it shines. It is good elsewehere but not as good. It is free and nowadays well supported. It is a worthy contender for any task though still can't match the commercial three for stability across it's interfaces to applications. Something works on AIX, it will probably always work on AIX. Not true for Linux.

AIX this is probably the best commercial unix which is odd becuase I hate it so much. It dynamically tunes itself, the volume management is just great and you get onlineJFS equivalent for free. It is rock solid, the hardware is incredibly reliable too. "mksysb" knocks Ignite into a cocked hat. However, any unix that doesn't have a gettydefs file, uses a service starting application to get things running and dares to remove the "lp" print spooler and instead leave a revolting virtual printer concept deserves to die!

Solaris is absolutely rock solid and is pretty much true to unix roots. It is unix and it has always been a source of innovation but it is very limiting for the inexperienced system administrator. You need to add a lot of tools if you want to do things. It doesn't even come with "traceroute" by default. I realise that HP is going the Veritas route but Solaris volume management was an absolute joke by comparison to the others though seems to be improving. However, I quite like Solaris for some reason.

HP-UX seems, to me, to be a good balance between the two other commercial offerings you mention though it is a bit backward when it comes to kernel tuning. For enterpise level computing I would still choose HP-UX. Linux is probably the future though.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Mark, how beautiful said. I fully subscribe.

Two more remarks.

We have about 30 clients with HP-UX and 4 with AIX. We've had 4 machines with disk crashes, guess once what brand that was ... right the first time: AIX
I agree AIX' volume manager rocks. It outperforms HP's volume manager by factors. And smit is much better than SAM, but there it ends. Gosh how I would love our customers to swap AIX for HP-UX.

HP-UX also scalus much better than AIX when many users are concerned. At least in my experience.

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn [ who wonders why nobody mentions that OSF system Tru64, that should die a horrible death, because it only supports commands that nobody can remember ]

[MarkSyder]

Can I be a dissenting voice? I much prefer SAM to SMIT!

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Ralph Haefner]

Here is a site you might find useful to translate your current knowldege into the new OS.

http://www.bhami.com/rosetta.html

I went from 4 years of Solaris only to a place where there are all 4 types of Unix you mentioned, and I find this very useful. "Ok, I want to do a ptrdiag -v but it isn't available on HP/UX, what is the equivalent command?"