lsof command in hpux base OS

[hpuxrox]

I have found lsof to be very useful tool in troubleshooting. I have seen it come up many times in this forum alone. I have even seem HP engeers recommend installing it to troubleshoot. On every new project, I find myself bumping myself in the head to get management approval to install this 3rd party utility.

My question is why it is not part of the base OS? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[Jeff Schussele · Accepted solution]

Hi Yates,

I agree.
My guess would be that since it wasn't written by HP personnel, HP won't put their seal of approval on it - probably liability or copyright related reasons.

My 2 cents,
Jeff

[ashish nanjiani]

I agree to Jeff, i had bumped my head with HP on that and the answer remains the same.Its not official!!!!

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

HI

There are many parts of HP-UX that started life this way.

Lsof or somthing based upon it will be included in the future.

Tusc is a program I have to fight management to install.

Paula

[hpuxrox]

Paula,

Yes, I have to fight tusc too.

[Helen French]

Hi Yates:

I agree that these utilities are very good. But, as these programs are ported by Public domains, I don't think HP will include these on their OS releases. At the same time, HP do release patches for some of these utilities (eg: lsof with 11i). Infact these utilities are using HP functions such as 'pstat' for gathering the information.

May be they will come up with better tools in future !

HTH,
Shiju

[Roger Baptiste]

hi,

Agreed about lsof. It's often that i run into a system with a problem where lsof would help, but is not installed.

On the same note, why is HP still still shipping the Jurassic version of Perl?? Perl5 is current and standard , so why not make it a part of the O/S applications? (i don't know about 11i, but it is perl4 in 11.00).

cheers
-raj

[melvyn burnard]

Just for info, there have been Enhancement Requests put in to have lsof added.
It is being looked into, but I cannot tell you whether it will or will not happen.

[S.K. Chan]

Yates, we have a local distribution process that distributes a lot of unix tools to our client machines and lsof is one of them. So all of our Unix box has lsof among other useful tools. You could probably do the same, no need to wait for it to be included in the OS installation.

just my thoughts

[hpuxrox]

Thank Chan,

But in my case I move to a lot of environments. Never one the same. So I do not have the opportunity to do that.

[Bill Hassell]

As always, customer requests drive many of the decisions made by marketing as far as tools and base OS standards, and well, glaciers move a *lot* faster.

However, there are a couple of suggestions. First, join Interex, the HP user group and make your voice heard in the special interext groups (like HP-UX Sysadmin) as well as the System Improvement Ballot. Then contact your local user group (found on the Interex web site at www.interex.com) and become involved. Sharing experiences with other customers as well as local HP representatives are certainly productive. I will often make presentations at local user groups.

Now there is hope in another area: devresource.hp.com which is where public domain software is ported to SD format. You'll find Perl 5, gdb, even gcc and many other tools. Use the feedback button on the bottom left to request more Open Source programs (like lsof) to be ported to this site. And most important for highly restricted IT sites: the software comes from HP, which can sometimes bypass the rules about freeware, etc.

[Pete Randall]

Brother Yates,

I have to second Bill's thoughts: advocacy via Interex is the best way to go, but any way you can make your voice heard is good, it's just a question of turning up the volume.

There's lots of precedent for this type of thing. I believe it was in 11.0 Softbench that Softedit was changed to invoke emacs. So the moral is - keep shouting, eventually HP will hear you.

Pete

[hpuxrox]

I would like to thank everyone for their support on this issue. I guess I will just have to keep pushing.

Thanks,

Yates

[John Payne_2]

Do they allow you to install things like glance? lsof is simply a tool for you to use to diagnose systems problems. When I install a box, I install what we call a 'toolbox' of things in with the OS. As far as management is concerned, the 'toolbox' is part of the OS.

Maybe if you started calling stuff you add something like a 'toolbox', they will start accepting the word, and then you either stick lsof in the 'toolbox' from the start, or start fighting to have it added to the 'toolbox'.

They may not want it in the OS, but might not have a problem with it being a part of the 'toolbox'. It sounds irrational, but you need to rememeber that you are dealing with management...

Hope it helps

John

[John Carr_2]

Hi Yates

we make this available to all our servers by having a filesystem exported to all other servers with our favourite utilities.

Luckily Im in charge of the setup so we can do this.

I reckon we must see some version of this released within the operating system in the near future.

good luck with mgmt
John.

[Wodisch]

Hi,

try to walk the paths describey by Bill and John:
built your own "toolbox" and get that approved - not the individual tools.
Second, tools like "lsof" are already deliverd by HP as part of some of the admin products (e.g. OpenView Operations/Unix includes it with the ITO agents!).
So that may be useful to convince your management, as OpenView Operations is much newer than the operating system, and hence includes the newer (and better fitting) tools.
Another tool you can get from HP is "VNC" (Virtula Network Computing), which is even supported by the SureStore department for the XP512, and is available from HP for OpenView SIP...

HTH,
Wodisch