Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Systems and Workgroups
Workgroup Focus
Chapter 144
Workgroup Focus
Most system administration manuals, including the HP-UX System
Administration Tasks manual in past releases, focus on single-system
tasks, telling you how to configure and maintain individual systems.
This is essential information, but it is not enough. These days, most
systems are not used in isolation; rather, computing resources are shared
across several systems: applications, files, databases, services such as the
World-Wide Web and mail, and peripherals such as printers, are usually
available to the users of more than one system and in some cases are
shared among hundreds or thousands of systems.
So common is the practice of sharing resources that the old way of
thinking of a system as a single “box” is often no longer useful; the
“system” a system administrator has to manage usually consists of at
least one server distributing resources over a LAN to at least five or six
clients, some of which in turn may share resources with each other. In
this document, we’ll refer to such interdependent systems as
workgroups, reserving the term system to mean a single “box.”
When so many major resources are shared, routine tasks such as
bringing a new system online, doing backups, updating software, adding
users and booting and shutting down systems, are all a little more
complex than they would be if the system existed in isolation.
For example, it is relatively simple task to shut down a standalone
system, but shutting down a file server without disrupting the work of
the users who depend on it requires some planning, and could require
work, such as copying the shared file systems to an alternative server
and copying them back before you bring the original server back online.
In addition, the HP-UX operating system feature called OLA/R enables
the On-Line Addition and Replacement of PCI I/O cards, which allows
the administrator to add a new card and/or replace an existing card
without affecting other components of that system, other systems
connected to that workstation or requiring a reboot.
OLA/R concepts and procedures are presented in detail in the
Configuring HP-UX for Peripherals book.
This document provides simple, reliable guidelines and recipes for
managing such real-life tasks, while continuing to cover the basics of
single-system administration.