How to acquire hpux skills?

[sanwin]

Hi All,
Please suggest any common method of acquiring skills in hpux, and scripting.

studying only documents alone does not help i guess.

any suggestions or comments!!

actually we sysadmins doing routine tasks, our mind does not think apart from that. how to change that? any comments /suggestions?


regards,
sanwin

[Dennis Handly]

For scripting, look at some existing scripts. You could look at questions in the forums asking for scripts. Make sure you understand them. (Look for "threads with solutions".)

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

As for scripting, this is an excellent site from which to study (by example):

http://www.shelldorado.com/

A recent thread (here) offers some insights into best practices for scripting:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1102091

Regards!

...JRF...

[Reshma Malusare]

HI sanwin,
For acquiring skills, anytime hands on is best practice.Do as much as practice,practical work to get experience & it will increase your knowledge also.
As unix is very vast.Updating your knowledge is the best thing.
For scripting,try to have look on some scripts,so that you will get chance to develop your skills in logical way.

According to me you can improve your skills by reading forum questions.

Regards
Reshma

[sanwin]

thanks dennis, james and reshma. will start now....
regards,
sanwin

[Patrick Wallek]

Yes, you can get bogged down in routine very easily. The trick is to not allow yourself to do that.

As you do routine tasks you should be thinking and asking yourself "how can I make this easier?" "Can I automate this?" If you are doing the same thing every day, then it is something that should be automated. You can do almost anything via scripts.

The best teacher is just experience. The best thing any sysadmin can have is a machine to practice on. This should be a machine that is NOT a production server, or even a development server. You need to have the flexibility to experiment, and if you really mess it up, then it's no problem when you have to reinstall HP-UX.

You MUST be able to experiment and learn that action A leads to result B.

[Geoff Wild]

Best way to aquire skills is to learn - so take courses on HP-UX:

http://education.hp.com/curr-unix.htm

Rgds...Geoff

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Actually you already have an excellent source right in front of you. Simply monitor the Forums or examine old threads but do not look at the responses. How would you deal with the situation/problem as presented? Often the question is stated so poorly or so lacking in data as to be impossible to answer. Your first task is to learn how to ask questions in such a way that it becomes possible to answer. This applies equally if you are asking other humans (or yourself), machines, or nature. The questions and problems in the Forums will expose you to a range of situations that no one admin would ever see.

[gstonian]

What not install a local unix tool such as cygwin where you can play and create scripts etc. I recently installed poderosa which as well as being a great free utility, also provides a cygwin interface


Have fun !

[Reshma Malusare]

Hi,
Please read:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/helptips.do?#33 on how to reward any useful answers given to your questions.

[rmueller58]

I agree with clay, one of the best sources on information is on these forums. That and a good relationship with your HP Field Engineer.

For going on 7 years, the forums have been a good source of Q&A for me. A lot of these guys have been around FOREVER.

Other the years, Clay, Stephen, and others have answered my "newbie" questions and made suggestions that have been very helpful and career saving.
Scripting is something I've learned through doing and posting a script here once written asking for feedback if it isn't providing the exact output requirement generally illicits many responses.

I've bought several books on scripting as well and their are torn and tatered.

Lowell Jay Arthur's Book Unix Shell Programming is sitting on my desk now,

Kochan and Wood's Unix Shell programming is another, This book is falling apart from use.

Any complex command can generally be scripted.

HP/UX admin skills for the printing, disk, io management comes from getting intimate with your system.

[rmueller58]

Add Patrick, and Geoff to the list of what I would consider HP/UX gurus. Not to slight anyone, there are too many names to mention in one post of the people have been beyond very helpful.

[Ralph Grothe]

This may sound pretty daft, but I would say simply by getting hands on as much as possible.

Letting you admins only perform routine tasks that don't let you any resources to explore and play with the system (on a test box of course) isn't very wise of your management.

I think you should be given the chance to completely clobber an equivalent system as those of your production servers, and do a full bare-metal recovery.
Also I would recommend to do all your juggling with disks, copying, backups, recovery, lvm management etc. by hand at the shell to gain sufficient confidence to perform quite routinely in a disaster situation with all sorts of people suddenly pestering you with reclaiming their data as quickly as possible.

Always test what you backed up by performing recoveries of all kinds to be sure that (almost) every can be restored.