Solution for connecting WD USB 3.0 external drives in BL860c, OS running is HP-UX 11.31

[PEPSICOTeam]

whether we required downtime for this activity or not, Is this can be done online.

Once the drivers is plugged in whether it will detect automatically or we need to mount it manually ?

[Matti_Kurkela]

You won't get full USB 3 speeds: even the latest BL860c i4 blades only claim USB2 support.

The drives can be plugged in online: this is a fundamental part of USB specification and the 11.31 USB drivers support that.

But the number of USB devices supported by HP-UX is still quite limited: HP has made no promises to support all USB storage devices. The USB mass storage protocol is complex, and HP-UX might only support a particular subset of it.

If the device can be supported by the HP-UX USB mass storage driver, it should be detected automatically, so it will appear in the "ioscan" listing. But you will still need to mount it manually: the system does not know where you want the drive mounted, and there is no automounter for USB storage devices.

[Dennis Handly]

>there is no automounter for USB storage devices.

Isn't it only for NFS filesystems?

[Matti_Kurkela]

For HP-UX, NFS is the default automounter filesystem type, but on 11.31, the automount(1M) man page includes examples for setting up a CD and CacheFS automount entries... although the CD filesystem type and device name syntax seem suspiciously unlike HP-UX...

Cross-platform Unix admins might be reminded about a removable media automounter configurations like on Solaris, or various X desktop functions trying to achieve pretty much the same thing on many Linux distributions.

As an automounter is essentially just a pseudo-filesystem that can delay a filesystem I/O operation while it runs a configurable mount command/system call behind the scenes, I don't think it will necessarily need to be dependent on any particular filesystem type.