HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview HP-UX 11i v3 (B3921-90011, September 2010)

Limitations of Live Dumps
There are some key differences between live dumps and true crash dumps, some of which
represent limitations:
• The key difference between a live dump versus a crash dump is, of course, that HP-UX
continues to run while the dump is in progress.
The good news is that users of the system continue to work, and are unaffected by the
livedump process.
The bad news is that, because HP-UX continues to run, data structures within the operating
system continue to change during the dump process yielding a less accurate picture of the
system at the time the dump was initiated. Therefore, the dump saved by livedump can
contain some data structures in an inconsistent state. Also, the cause of an event you are
troubleshooting might be overwritten (and therefore lost) by ongoing system operations.
• Do not use livedump on systems that have experienced operating system faults that
destabilize the whole system. If a system has become unstable, it is probably better to let it
crash on its own or force a crash using a transfer of control (TOC)
Operating System and Software (Installation, Modification, and Removal)
Software is distributed in many forms (tar files, zip archives, and so on). HP-UX supports many
of the utilities that are used to distribute software; however, in the world of HP-UX, one format
is preferred above all others: Software Distributor (SD).
Software Distributor
Software Distributor is a collection of tools used for installing, maintaining, and distributing
applications and other software on HP-UX servers. It is the format HP uses to distribute HP-UX
and many other HP-UX related applications.
In addition to being a distribution format — which can reside on top of tar, cpio, ISO_9660,
HFS, VxFS, and most other physical file storage methods — Software Distributor maintains an
Installed Product Database that contains information about what applications and software are
currently installed on servers, version information about that software, and other important
attributes about the installed software. The installed product database is used by the SD utilities
to maintain the applications on a server.
Software Distributor is multi-server aware. Software packages (known as software depots) can be
maintained on one server and used by another server to install the associated packages.
The section “Software Distributor (SD)” (page 100) describes the individual components that
make up Software Distributor. The document Software Distributor Administration Guide fully
describes this technology.
Other Software Operating System Installation Technologies
There are several other pieces of the software installation picture:
Ignite/UX If you need to install a common set of HP-UX software on multiple
systems and would like to do it at one time, from one location, you
can use Ignite/UX. See “Ignite-UX” (page 93).
update-ux The update-ux command updates the HP-UX operating system
from new HP-UX media. See the manpage update-ux(1M) for details.
Dynamic Root Disk Dynamic Root Disk is an HP-UX system administration tool set used
to clone an HP-UX system image to a disk other than that from which
the system is currently booted, for purposes of software maintenance
and recovery. In this way, you can install software and patches to a
clone of your current system without affecting the running system. Then,
88 Major Components of HP-UX