by Hi Folks,
I've just recently purchased two HP 9000 systems and have been trying to
familiarize myself with them. I would appreciate it if someone wouldn't mind
answering a few questions / correcting any misconceptions.
The first machine is a 715/33 with 16 meg of ram and what seems to be an
800 meg SCSI drive + scsi floppy drive. I've got a nice 17 inch monitor (A2287A)
which works fine. After some struggling I managed to get it to boot completely,
changed the root password, disabled the NIS and NFS which were* it during
the boot process (busy -- wait -- busy -- wait ...) and now it seems to work fine.
Uname reports that it's running HP-UX B 10.01, which I assume from the faq is the
"business edition" with a two user license. I can get Xwindows to run as root
(not sure the proper way to start it, xinit? X? something else?), but I can't get
it to run as a user (says something about pex failing). It is, however,
excruciatingly slow. It takes a few minutes for xwindows to come up, then a few
minutes more if I try to open a new xterm. I don't know if this is just the normal
speed for the machine (doubt it) or the result of it not being connected to any
kind of network (I'll take care of that tommorow if I can find an AUI -> 10b2
transceiver at the local junk shop). Something is definitely slowing it down.
Aside from that it seems workable.
The second machine is a 735 with 16 meg of ram and two 1.2 gig SCSI
drives. It's got three bnc jacks (RGB) in the back, which I assume is sync on
green, but I don't have a monitor to try it out. Don't know if an adaptor would
let me use the A2287A monitor with it, or where to find or find a wiring diagram
for such a thing. The two scsi drives are looped to a scsi-in and scsi-out port
on the back of the machine, but as far as I can tell aren't connected to the
machine save for a powersupply connector. That seems pretty bizarre to me, but I
suppose you could just get a scsi connector and go from the scsi-out in the
central-panel and connect up the two drives. Maybe I'm just missing the internal
connection.
I'd like to get at least one of these machines in usable condition, the
715/33 would probably make a great x-term if I could get over the speed problem.
Random questions:
On linux I can swap consoles with Alt-FN, does anything similar exist under HP-UX?
I have no feel for how fast these machines are. I realize it's comparing apples to
oranges, but is it safe to assume that the 715/33 is about the speed of a 66mhz
486 and the 735 is something like a Pentium 100mhz?
What are these machines worth? Is there anyone in the NJ area who'd want them and
actually know how to admin them?
Any comment, advice, complaint, etc would be greatly appreciated. I'd like
to put these two machines to good use (hook them into a little pvmpov render
farm), but I need a bit more info.
Thanks
Matthew
--
"Wherever you are living... don't move. Sounds like some
sort of fuzz paradise." - Paula Sorensen