How to share file systems between 2 HP-UX machines

[Kevin Bingham]

Hello all,

I am a novice with respect to System Administration of HP-UX. We have an HP9000/D220 32-bit machine running HP-UX 11.11, and will soon be taking delivery of an HP9000/L1000 64-bit machine (also running 11.11, I think).

As preparation, I am trying to find a recipe/cribsheet/method for sharing the filesystems between these two machines. My research so far has shown that NFS is probably the simplest way to go... is this assumption true? Either way an list of things to be done would be great.

Also, I need confirmation that there will not be any problems sharing filesystems between 32-bit and 64-bit architecture... If there are problems, how can I get around them...

Any advice/info will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Regards
Kevin

[Pete Randall]

Kevin,

I would agree that NFS is probably your answer. You might even want to look into automount. I think SAM can guide you through the enablement of both.

Pete

[Pete Randall]

Kevin,

Sorry, missed that part about 32/64 bit architectures. It shouldn't be a problem - we shared between 10.20 and 11.0 (64 bit) while we were transitioning off 10.20.

Pete

[Darren Prior]

Hi Kevin,

I'd agree that NFS is probably the simplest way forward for you, but you could consider using CIFS if you're likely to need to share these filesystems out to PCs as well.

regards,

Darren.

[Kevin Bingham]

Thanks for the replies so far...

As I mentioned I am a novice, and therefore would be most greatful for the detailed breakdown of everything that would be needed to implement either NFS or CIFS (connecting to the PC is done via FTP at present, but it would be nice to enable access natively on the PC via Windows explorer for example.)

Is it possible to have both NFS and CIFS available?

Regards
Kevin

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi
NFS is the standard solution for sharing files in a Unix enviroment, If you need Windows acess too CIFS (Samba) can coexist with NFS on the file server. The disadvantage with NFS is that only one host (the NFS-server) has direct access to the data. The (NFS)clients access the data over the lan and via the server. This makes more overhead and (for example) you should not run a database on a NFS-mounted filesystem.

If you have extreme needs there is perhaps another solution, Veritas Cluster File System. This is a SAN thecnology and makes it possible to get directa access from several hosts to the same data. But this solution is not cheap.

http://eval.veritas.com/downloads/pro/sp_fdn_suite_ha/spfs_datasheet_pdf.pdf

[steven Burgess_2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Kevin

Here you go

http://support5.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000062972461

I'll get the CIFS doc for you as well

HTH

Steve

[steven Burgess_2]

Hi

Here is the CIFS doc

http://support5.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000062921708

HTH

Steve

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

As long as you don't call the 64bit programs over the NFS on the 32bit machine you are safe, but you might be slow.

Read http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x6e9493e260b0d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html thouroghly before you decide

Samba/CiFS *is* faster, but much harder to set up/maintain

Another thing to check in NFS environments is symbolic links. HP often installs /absolute/ path names in symlinks, which may come as unwanted and nasty surprises.
Giver that your 32bit machine is called b32 and the 64bit machine b64 (just for simplicity and example), and all filesystems are exported to eachother.
Now mount b64's /usr to b32's /b64nfs/usr and then

b32 # cd /b64nfs/usr/lib/terminfo

guess what you get when you pwd? /b64/usr/lib/terminfo? wrong
b32 # pwd
/usr/share/lib/terminfo

Hmmm, when would HP start making these links relative? [ hint, hint, hint :) ]

A last remark about NFS usage and shared data, be it documents, or program sources, or whatever, SYNC TIME! Run xntpd or any other service that keeps the time on the machines in sync.

HTH. My ??? 2.00 from a havy NFS user

[Kevin Bingham]

Thanks again for the info... it looks reasonably straight forward to setup NFS. I realise that the network link makes the access slow, especially since our D220 box only has a 10Mb/s card...

One thing which is not explicitly mentioned in the documents at the end of thes elinks is whether or not this will result in an automount on the client side of NFS. I am guessing that it does...

Also, just for confirmation, could I setup NFS so that host1 is a CLIENT of host2 and SERVER to host2 and host2 is a CLIENT of host1 and SERVER to host1... in otherwords a two-way link from either machine... ( I guess that this shouldn't be a problem.)

Both of these machines are used only for porting our software to Unix, and therefore the security issues are less important, maximising flexibility is the only aim...

Regards
Kevin

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

10Mb/s is far to slow to run a DB connection over. JFYI.

Automount is just another slowdown. I'd recommend to disable it and always mount manually.

NFS can be setup as a two-way spider. We've got 5 systems here (10.20, 11.00, 11.00, AIX 4.3 and AIX 4.2) that have all their FS's exported *AND* mounted. For transparicy, all hosts are mounted on a root directory with their hostname.

Have fun.