HP filesystem on IBM AIX

[Larry Basford]

Is there any way to mount an HP filesystem on an AIX system ? Or is there a common filesystem that can be userd?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Larry,

NFS
CIFS/Samba

Either would do the trick. The NFS client is built into HP-UX. the NFS server is probably built into IBM AIX.

SEP

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Can you use NFS? Set up the HP machine as an NFS server, export the filesystem, then mount it on the AIX box. See "man exportfs".


Pete

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi,

You can use NFS, export the filesystem on HPUX and mount it on AIX.

HPUX
# sam

Networking and communications
Networked filesystems
Exported local filesystems
Actions ->> add exported filesystem

AIX
# smit
communications applications and services
nfs
networked filesystems
add a filesystem for mounting

Hope this helps,
Robert-Jan

[Geoff Wild]

NFS is your best option - you can't just take a disk from a HP-UX machine and plug it into an AIX one....

Rgds...Geoff

[Arunvijai_4]

Hello,

As others specified, you can easily configure and use "NFS". We have a pool of AIX servers sharing common folders from HP-UX and Solaris NFS servers.

-Arun

[Larry Basford]

I can read the NFS mounted disk OK I have used this option before. Thanks for the sugestion.

But
on AIX when I try to do a copy of 80GB NFS mounted I only get about 1 1/2 GB/hour.

Would I be better off tar to tape?

Or can I Fiber connect the systems to get a better transfer rate?

Direct connect two nics with a Xover cable and route directly?

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi Larry,

speed of transfer between the two servers will depend greatly on the network connection between these two.

Ideally a direct fiber connection between the two servers wil give you the best performance.

hope this helps!

kind regards
yogeeraj

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi Larry,
I do remember seeing this sort of behaviour (speed...) and the best of all one way goes faster (+50% -to almost double) than the other, I tested with ftp and rcp and found the same phenomeon (but this was more than 2 years ago...) and the fastest way was using nfs with cpio...

All the best
Victor

[Mark Ellzey]

Larry,

If you are only getting 1.5GB/hour, I would check the switch port. Be sure the speed and duplex setting on the switch port match those of your NIC card. I've seen this type of behaviour on hosts that had mis-matched NIC/Port settings.

Regards,
Mark

[Victor BERRIDGE]

You may have hit the nail Mark!
Quite right AIX seem to have trouble with negotiation so IBM recommend to fix the speed... and I had to do the same on all the HP after because the switches went bezerk...

There may very well be some lan config mismatch

All the best
Victor

[Larry Basford]

I had the AIX FS mounted on the HP to do the copy to the AIX FS and this was slow.

So I change to mounting the HP FS on the AIX server and it is much faster.
This puts AIX in control of it's own filesystem for creading directories and files.

Also very different to mount an NFS in AIX.

I had checked the NIC's and they were both 100FD on the same switch.

Thanks for all of the responses.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

I think it would be better for You to simply debug and resolve the NFS/Network issue You encounter than to try anything else.

I can come up with a few weird ways for potentially accessing the HP-UX disks, some of which might even work, but it's nonsense :)

For Your information:
I have an old RS/6000 which will easily deliver >10MB/s for NFS transactions.

A small checklist:
- Are both nodes showing use of NFS version3?
- is the performance close to line rate when using ftp for a test file transfer?

if the ftp transfer shows high performance, debug NFS settings, if ftp is also slow, check network parameters and connection.

Florian