Xterminals (HDS or NCD)

[Christina Martin]

When we first got our HP Servers (L2000) we bought HDS Viewstations they were later substituted with NCD Workstations. At that time our OS was 10.20.

When we moved to HP-UX 11.0, we were able to bring the /usr/tftpdir directory structure over to the new system (still L2000 - just an OS upgrade) ... and make these Xterminals work. We were told that HP no longer supported the Xterminals, BUT we were still able to make them work.

Now that we are moving to 11.23 they won't work at all. Any suggestions on tweaking the system to get these to work. I only need them for 2 development sites.

Thank in advance.
Lisa

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Well, I don't know about HDS or NCD but I am, in fact, using the obsolete HP Entria II's X-terminals and they are running just fine and are booting from an 11.23 box --- eventhough the latest available software for these things was 10.20. It really shouldn't matter. All you really need to do is transfer the software to the same path that it had on your 11.0, NFS export any directories the X-terminals needs, and then setup bootp entries for the MAC addresses of your X-terminals. Your X-terminals don't really execute anything on the hosting computer so the version doesn't matter. The hosting computer just needs to be able to respond to a bootp request and transfer the boot data to the terminal.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Plan B. Surrender Dorothy. Go buy a copy of Reflection-X and run it on your PC (or use Linux). However, I really like an X-terminal because when combined with an LCD monitor, it makes a tiny footprint on your desk.

[Tom Henning]

I went through the exercise Clay mentions above a couple of weeks ago installing two X-terminals o (Envizex-II's) onto a semi-isolated system. It was not a hard task, copy the software from my main server onto thte new system, change the /etc/bootptab and /etc/exports files. It would have been easier if I had not turned off a number of services hardening the box last year, but I managed to get them all (NFS/inetd/bootp) turned back on.

I also prefer an X-terminal over a X-windows client on a PC. With the X-terminal you have no OS to worry about, no moving hardware within the box, and no windows reboots to interrupt the work. Using a KVM switch it takes very little desktop space.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

For many years we were running an obsolete terminal just like A. Clay was. We had glance running on it, looking for performance issues. The graphs made managers happy.

Then it broke.

HP service was called, and replaced it. It was out of support we got a very large replacement bill.

So we spent $1,500 on an NCD box. The support was horrible and I had to figure out a lot of things by trial an error. Finally we got it to boot off software on our production server and had it do the same thing the old HP box was doing.

It had a lot more memory and its network port was more flexible not going down when the network people decided that 10 BaseT half duplex manual was a bad switch port setting.


The NCD box will work just fine. You can also keep the 11.00 box around merely to support the old box. It can be used to monitor the 11.23 sytesms, it just can't boot off of them.

SEP