HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview

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 123) describes the individual components
that make up Software Distributor. The document Software Distributor Administration
Guide fully describes this technology.
Operating System and Software (Installation, Modification, and Removal) 107