HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks

The best course of action is to alert the administrators of systems who have
NFS-mounted file systems from your computer to unmount the NFS-mounted file systems
before you shut down your system! By doing this, they will simply need to re-mount the
NFS file systems from your computer when your computer is back on line. No reboot
of the other systems will be required.
Refer to the mount_nfs(1m) manpage for information on mount options like “hard”
and “soft”.
NOTE: This can have a cascading effect. For example, if computer A has
NFS-mounted a file system from computer B, and computer B needs to be rebooted
because it had NFS-mounted a different file system from computer C, which was
shut down without notice. It is important for the administrator of computer B to warn
the administrator of computer A to unmount any NFS-mounted file systems from
computer B, or computer A will also need to be rebooted as an indirect consequence
of computer C being shut down.
NFS Client
Provided that NFS clients are not also acting as NFS servers for other computers
(computer B in the preceding note is acting as both NFS client and server), it is safe
to shut them down without affecting the NFS server. It will simply be necessary to
remount the file system from the NFS server when the NFS client has rebooted. This
is probably done automatically during the boot-up process.
Avoiding a Shutdown When Possible
As described earlier, there are times when a normal, planned shutdown is appropriate.
But as server downtime becomes less desired and accepted, on-line addition and replace
functionality can help you to avoid shutting down a server in many cases.
On-line Addition and Replacement of PCI Cards (OLA/R)
HP-UX’s On-line Addition and Replacement of PCI Cards (OLA/R) features enable
you to replace a faulty interface card or add a new interface card to a running system,
without impacting the system’s users.
Refer to the book Configuring HP-UX for Peripherals for detailed OLA/R concepts and
procedures.
Configuring Dump Devices
HP-UX system crashes (system panics) are rare, but when they do occur you want to
be prepared to capture the contents of memory so that if necessary you can analyze
(or have an expert analyze) the memory content to try to determine what caused the
crash.
92 Booting and Shutdown