Old Fashioned

The 712/80 is a 32-bit machine. I got rid of all my SPARC32 machines some time ago, yet held on to this, my sole HP/UX box. Unfortunately, the HP Porting & Archive Center no longer contains binaries for 32-bit machines. So, I had to compile everything from source. Including the compiler. Can you say, "Old skool?"

In theory, it is possible to use an older (binary) version of HP-UX gcc to build this release, but we have not done this ourselves and cannot help if you have problems with such a build. It also creates a "chicken and egg" situation (i.e. you'd need gcc to build gcc) that users starting from scratch may find hard to solve.

On my first day as an HP/UX admin we lost a production vPar in a nPar. That is to say, a virtual software partition inside a discrete hardware partition. These are new since I left HP/UX so I've been simultaneously reading the vPar and nPar handbooks side-by-side. At 300 pages filled with concepts and commands, its unlikely I'll remember much of it, but its a great introduction. Anyway, production outages are a fantastic way to quickly learn these things, so despite its severity, I was thrilled it happened. (the vPar lost its disk header information (LIF) and we used Ignite to 'boot' the partition and restored its boot sector.)

This group is genuinely happy to have me on the team, which is surprising since I spent the majority of these last weeks with my old group doing nothing but paperwork. I was feeling quite useless. Of course the rumors surrounding my sudden departure mostly revolve around me hating one or more of my co-workers or bosses. While entirely untrue and baseless, the grapevine also reveals that my former co-workers and bosses don't dare approach me themselves. Its all quite humorous. Sad, but humorous. Regardless, I'm excited to get my hands back on HP's unix and hope to be a great asset to the team.

Back to belanna - the tarball kept failing with a checksum error; usually indicative of using tar vs. gnu tar on Sun (due to path length) - yet I obviously couldn't compile gtar without gcc...users starting from scratch may find hard to solve. So I untar'd it with 7zip on my PC and then added .rhosts entries and rcp'd over the directory. No, I'm not kidding. And it took me FOREVER to set up, and then to turn everything back off. But no, even that builds a 64-bit architecture binary by default. It gave me the compiler flag to add for 32-bit compiling, but didn't *actually* include the gmake in which it needed to run. I just don't understand what the point was.

I did eventually find an older version binary, and used that. However: [package] requires both HP's ANSI C and HP's ANSI C++ compiler to build. That and 80Mhz is awfully, awfully slow. If I don't soon get a 64-bit machine I may choose to just walk the Earth, like Kane in Kung-Fu.

This sucks. I'm going to bed.