HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview

• Allows you to establish multiple hardware paths to disk and other mass storage

devices using a single device special file.

• Allows the kernel to automatically bypass failed hardware paths without having

to change the device’s associated device special file.

• Allows you to relocate (logically or physically) a disk device to a new hardware

location without having to change its device special file.

Online Activation and Deactivation of PCI Cards

HP-UX 11i version 3 expands your ability to replace hardware components on a running

instance of HP-UX without having to shut down or reboot.

PCI Cards

With HP-UX 11i version 3 you can:

• Add PCI / PCI-X cards to a running instance of HP-UX.

• Replace a PCI / PCI-X card (with one of the same type) in a running instance of

HP-UX (for example, if a card is not working properly).

• Delete a PCI / PCI-X card from a running instance of HP-UX.

The cards and their associated drivers must support OL* operations (most do). There

are also other important considerations when adding and removing PCI cards. For

complete details on PCI / PCI-X Online operations, see the Interface Card OL* Support

Guide (Part Number 5992–1723).

Longer User and Group Names

In HP-UX 11i version 3, User and Group names can now be up to 255 characters long.

For information about configuring users and groups, see HP-UX System Administrator’s

Guide: Configuration Management.

CAUTION: Be careful, when using the new longer names, to insure that all systems

needing to interact with a server that uses long user/group names are capable of using

the longer names. Servers using older versions of HP-UX or servers using non-HP-UX

operating systems might not yet be compatible with this new feature.

Concurrent Dump

When an HP-UX system panic (crash) occurs, a memory dump is usually written to

disk so that, if necessary, an analysis can be done to determine what caused the crash.

On servers with very large amounts of memory, the process of writing memory contents

to disk can take a very long time. If you have multiple devices configured for memory

dump, HP-UX can be configured to split the task of dumping memory and write to the

devices in parallel. This process is called dump concurrency and is configured using

1. Whether or not a crash dump is written to disk is configurable.

20 HP-UX Version 3 at a Glance