Unstable hardware running hpux 9.04

[Ross Goldman_2]

Help! We have a legacy system running a custom application. The hardware is an 8000/H50 and it is running hpux 9.04. The hardware is becoming unstable (had to bang on the external disk tower with a hammer to get it to spin up last reboot!) If we try porting the application to a supportable platform I'm not at all sure it will run. If we copy everything to a new piece of hardware will hpux 9.04 run on it? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Helen French]

What would be that new piece of hardware? HP-UX 9.04 is very very old and won't run on the newer revision of hardwares. You may consider putting a new OS and install your application there.

[Steven E. Protter]

You are going to have to do an OS upgrade. Unless you want to take a chance on picking up another H40 on ebay.

SEP

[Graham Cameron_1]

9.04 is very old, as too is your H50.

Suggest you upgrade both before you lose everything.
Is the custom app in house and if so do you have the source?
Or if it is external then the vendor must have an upgrade path. HP-UX 9.x is not fully y2k compliant.

-- Graham

[Ross Goldman_2]

Thanks all for the replies. The app was developed inhouse but (of course) the developers are long gone. I guess we'll try porting to a supportable platform and hope for the best.

[Darren Prior]

Hi Ross,

I don't believe any new hardware from the last 5 years would run 9.04 - it wasn't a Y2K compliant OS. I think you're going to need to investigate 2nd hand hardware of the same vintage to use for spares or to build a replacement system - meanwhile try to port or upgrade the app.

regards,

Darren.

[curt larson_1]

in the short term it would be easiest to buy additional replacement parts as Darren suggested. But, these will likely be used and probably have a very short if any warranty.

I'm sure if you posted your drive information and your email address several resellers will contact you. I might even have several drives that might be suitable.

in the long run if your going to continue running this application for several years, it would be more cost effective to port the application to supported version of the OS

[Joe Colucci_1]

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[Belinda Dermody]

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[Darren Prior]

Hi all,

Can I draw your attention to the forum guidelines regarding advertising at http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/helptips.do?#9

regards,

Darren.

[Angus Crome]

Ross,

It sounds like your problems are with your disks, not the system. You should be able to replace those readily, without having to switch out your Server. If you need identical disks, however, that would be more problematic. Search any on-line Auction/Trading site for those.

I don't believe even the K-Class supports 9.04, so upgrading out of the NOVA class servers is pretty much out of the question.

For confirmation of this for the K-Clas see,

http://www2.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000062688701

[Bill Hassell]

As mentioned, you can get used H50's or others in that same family for just a few hundred dollars on eBay and other sites. But as mentioned, if just the disk is going bad, don't waste dozens to hundreds of hours porting to a new platform, just get new disks. The disks are plain vanilla SCSI-2 disks but for 9.04, don't buy anything larger than 2Gb for the boot disk or 4Gb for any other disk (boot limitations). And be sure to buy several because these small disks are hard to find.

As far as transferring the data, you'll need to become familiar with dd since there is no Ignite/UX for anything prior to version 10 of HP-UX. If the application is critical, hire a consultant (probably a retiree from HP) that remembers 9.04 and have them setup a complete backup and recovery procedure (my guess is that the one you are using may not actually work). Since the old hardware is so cheap (shipping is more than the cost of the box), I would try duplicating the current box and use it as a possible porting box as well as a replacement. Note that an H50 (the entire F,G,H,I series) will run 11.0 which wil help a lot in the porting process.

[Joshua Scott]

As Bill suggested, buy new disks. I would reccomend something like the HASS (AKA Jamaica) Disk System. You can find these pretty easily and they should work with your system if you have a 20MB/s Fast/Wide SCSI card installed.

They can hold up to (8) 2GB or 4GB drives.

HTH!

-Josh

[doug hosking]

Ross, what does your custom application do, what hardware dependencies does it have and how hard would it be to test on another box? While I certainly can't make any promises, quite a few older applications run without change to the binaries on the newer HP-UX releases.

I'd be tempted to try reinstalling your application on an 11.00 or 11.11 box rather than risk a lot of down time on hardware of increasingly questionable reliability and availability. That way you'll have a much better chance of getting support from HP when you need it most. Even the lowest end A500, B2600, etc. would almost certainly run rings around your H50. I have to believe there's a ton of those floating around on the used market.

9.04 and the H50 are a decade or more old. Even though that generation of hardware was pretty solid (I still have an I70 that's been running happily since 1993) I certainly wouldn't encourage you to invest a lot in the older hardware if you have any reasonable choice and if that application is critical to your busines. You'd be much better off doing a planned migration than have to deal with a problem in crisis mode when your disk completely dies on you.

As previously noted, the limiting factor will soon probably be more your disks, not the CPU. Single-ended SCSI is pretty well dead in the industry, and I know of nobody making such small disks any more.