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.
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