Filesharing between HP-UX 9.X & Windows 2K / XP

[GoldnPantaloons]

So the company I work for has has several HP Model 715s with HP-UX 9 on them that run software which controls Zeiss CMMs, and they're still going strong.  The data that the machines collect is spit into a folder that resides on a  Windows NT4 machine and is mounted via NFS using DiskShare.  My problem is that these NT4 machines have become a major pain, and a liability, as we've upgraded the rest of our network.  I would love to be able to make them W2K, or even XP machines, but I simply cannot get the HP machine to mount an NFS share from either OS.  Whenever I try and mount the directory via SAM I get an RCP timeout.

So I guess my question would be, is making the Windows machine the NFS server even the best way to go about this?  I've heard that using samba on the HPUX machine could be a viable alternative, but I haven't had much luck with finding any documentation for it on v9.

Any suggestions? I'm a total rookie when it comes to unix administration, so maybe I'm just not look looking in the right places.  Any helping hands would be greatly appreciated :)

[Patrick Wallek]

I seriously doubt you are going to find anything regarding Samba on HP-UX version 9.  HP-UX 9 has been out of support for a LONG time.  It was originally released in 1992.

I think NFS may be your best bet, but I don't know what version of NFS HP-UX 9 used.  It may be that it is incompatible with current NFS clients available on Windows (which likely use NFS v3 or v4).

[Matti_Kurkela]

You mean RPC timeout I guess?

Before even trying to mount the filesystem, you probably should make some low-level RPC/NFS functionality checks.

If the HP-UX 9.X system has the "rpcinfo" command, run "rpcinfo -p": it should output a list of SunRPC services running on the HP-UX 9.x system itself. (NFS belongs to a family of SunRPC services)

Then run "rpcinfo -p <windows_NFS_server>". It should output a similar list, which should include at least the NFS service components "portmapper", "status", "nfs" and "mountd". The output should also include port numbers for each component service, and the supported protocol version numbers for each.

If the rpcinfo command fails, it probably means it cannot connect to port 111 on the queried host (either TCP or UDP). A connection to this port is required to identify the port numbers of all the other NFS service components, as the port numbers may vary.

Make sure that both the NFS client and server can resolve each other's hostnames. In particular, the IP address -> hostname resolution is important. Sometimes NFS server configuration lists the allowed clients by name: if IP->hostname resolution fails in this case, access will be denied. Listing the allowed clients by IP address is an acceptable workaround to this.

If "rpcinfo -p <windowshost>" is successful, the next step is "showmount -e <windowshost>". It queries the NFS server for names of shared paths. You can only mount something that is listed as shared ("exported" in older NFS terminology): any attempt to mount something that is not shared is going to fail. If you get no error messages but no shared paths at all, double-check the Windows NFS server configuration.

If the NFS server system is running Windows, the names of the NFS shares may be different from what you're expecting. The Windows concept of drive letters is thoroughly alien to HP-UX and NFS both: the Windows NFS server software probably uses some replacement syntax for them (check the Windows NFS server documentation). Also, Windows-style backslashes as pathname separators will probably be replaced by Unix-style forward slashes when viewed through NFS.

If you get RPC timeout messages with the "showmount" command, check that the Windows server allows incoming traffic on all the required ports (check the rpcinfo -p listing from before). If the Windows system has a software firewall configured (even the built-in Windows Firewall), you might have to explicitly configure it to allow traffic to all NFS component services.

[GoldnPantaloons]

I'm not sure rpcinfo even exists on 9. All I get is "ksh: rpcinfo : not found" Could it be that the command is just not registered, but still exists? I'm browsing through \usr\bin\ and not finding anything...

[Dave Olker]

Just to be clear, you installed and configured an NFS server software program on the Win2K and XP servers and made sure the NFS server was configured properly on these new systems?  Are you able to mount NFS volumes from these systems from any other systems in the network?  Do you have any evidence that the HP-UX client is the problem and not the NFS server configuration on the Win2K and XP systems?

Dave