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Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

 
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Stephanie L Davenport
Frequent Advisor

D350 Hardware upgrade

I have an old HP 9000 D350 that is still running in production. We are upgrading the hardware on it this weekend but, I'm not 100% sure what to do. A third party vendor is going to come out and replace the parts but, since HP doesn't support the hardware or software (hp-ux 10.20) anymore, I'm kinda lost as to what to do after we boot it back up. I've never done a hardware upgrade before... just fresh installs and patching.

It currently has 1 100MHz processor and 128MB of ram. According to vendor, they are going to install a new mother board with 2 160Mhz processors, 1.5GB of ram and a new power supply (basically upgrading it to a D370). When I boot the box up, what do I need to do in order for the OS to recognize everything new?
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Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor
Solution

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

In your case, just replace the hardware. All pathes will remain the same (if you do all connections like the original). Just make sure the system will copy the serial number from the systemboard to the COU board (it will ask you, answer yes). Make a backup!

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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DCE
Honored Contributor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade


Stephanie,

I have done this upgrade a couple times (although it was a couple of years ago)

There is no additional work more you as a sysadmin - all the system setting should remain the same.

The engineer doing the upgrade has to be careful (i.e. board placement and system serial number), but other than that is should go smoothly and relatively fast.
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

One possible "gotcha" is that the MAC address of the built-in ethernet port has changed. It is not uncommon for software licenses to be tied to this value so that the license server now fails to verify your formerly valid codes.
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

BTW, AFAIR the systemboard will remain in the system, only the CPU board will be changed. In this case, the system will notice a difference between stored serialnuber in cpu and system-board. if I remember right in this case it doesn't ask and will just copy the value from the systemboard to the cpu board, but I'm not really sure.

Anyway, the upgrade should not be a problem.

If you increase the amount of RAM, you should increase the swap too. Either you restore an ignite backup and adjust the value while restoring or you add secondary swap (in this case also re-configure the dump device).

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

__________________________________________________
There are only 10 types of people in the world -
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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Stephanie L Davenport
Frequent Advisor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

This machine uses FDDI instead of ethernet. Is that going to cause an issue?
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

All the time I talked about the serial number, but it is the MAC address!

The address is stored on the CPU and systemboard and will remain.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

__________________________________________________
There are only 10 types of people in the world -
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

__________________________________________________
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Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

I will explain this: Some software vendors will give you a licence to use their product on a certain machine. The software depends on the software ID (see man uname). The older systems calculate this value depending on the MAC address of the core I/O card stored in the system.

If the software ID is changed, the software won't run, because it's "thinking" this is another (not licenced) machine.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

__________________________________________________
There are only 10 types of people in the world -
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

__________________________________________________
No support by private messages. Please ask the forum!

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!   
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

In this case, it is the systemboard that will be changed and the MAC addreess will be different. I have even seen a case where the HP_ETHER_STATION_ADDRESS was set to the original board's MAC address and still the license wouldn't work. I was rather surprised that the explicit MAC address override wasn't recogized by the license server but I was never sufficiently curious to attempt to disassemble and analyze the code.

If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
Stephanie L Davenport
Frequent Advisor

Re: D350 Hardware upgrade

So, my question now would be... how do I fix it if the address is different and the software has fits because of it? The software hasn't been updated since the mid 90s. :)