How well do HP and SUN workstations mix

[David Hinnant]

schultz at mmm.serc.3m.com (John C Schultz) writes:
> I am looking for anyone's opinions on how well this will work.  How close
> is HP's UNIX to SunOS?  They both have NFS so can I mount SUN disks on the
> HP and vice-versa.  We use X windows on our SUNs, presumably the same
> software, e.g. twm, emacs, xgdb will work on HPs?

We have a HP-900/318M a Sun-3/260 and a Sun-4/260.  NFS is no problem,
although each system administers it differently (SunOS 3.5 on the Sun-3;
SunOS 4.01 on the Sun-4).  Ugh.  One nice thing though, HP has YP which
also works A-OK with the Suns.

We run X11r3 on the Suns and HP's very own X11r2 on the HP.  Ugh.  HP took
out most of the nicer core and user contributed standard HP stuff -- no
xcalc; not even xlogo!  Nice thing though, we have the X source...  I had
a "remsh" (HP's name for "rsh") on the HP that invoked xcalc and other
stuff off of the Suns.  No problem.  Dunno about gdb; we're just getting
the GNU stuff compiled and installed.

Our HP has no tape.  We do backups to the Suns over Ethernet of the user
files system.  If the system ever croaks, we'll borrow a tape drive and
rebuild enough to get Ethernet up and then restore from the Sun's tape
drive because (in my limited experience) HP TAPE DRIVES CANNOT READ  TAPES
CREATED ON ANY NORMAL MACHINE.  Also I cannot read normal tapes in my HP
machine.  What's the scoop? Has anyone found an exception to this?

Watch out for mail on the HP.  Sucks.  Big time.  Our Sun-4 serves as the
UUCP gateway to the outside world.  On the Suns you can use "@" and "!"
type network addresses to any machine.  On the HP if you use Ethernet as
the delivery media, good old UUCP syntax croaks; only Arpa style addresses
work.  HP says this will be fixed in HP-UX 6.5.  However, I'm not sure if
I want to run another larger OS on my non-upgradable, 4 MB 68020 machine.
It pages like a slug from hell now.  With just modest old me witha few
xterms and normal background daemons I whip a load average of 7-9 with no
effort.  Hhmmm.  You be the judge.

David Hinnant                    UUCP: ...{decvax,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!dfh
Bell Northern Research           (919) 991-8299