[Today’s run: 1 mile with the dog]
Today’s topic probably won’t make much sense to anyone. But I’m in the mood for a rant so here it comes.
At my day-job (night job, everytime job) I am the system administrator and DBA on a few computers. Our main database machines are HP boxes running HP-UX (a flavor of Unix).
We recently purchased some new HP servers as replacement for the older ones; because the new ones are a bit faster and they will hold a lot more memory, and because the old ones were getting really old.
One thing really nice about server-level machines over the last 10 years or so has been the development of system-monitor subsystems. These things are little computers that sit inside the big computer. You can hook them up and talk to the little computer and it will let you turn off and on the big computer, do installations just like if you were sitting there. Great for remote support work. On our old HP servers I had both network and dial-up access to the service monitor. So I could use old fashioned dial up and do an install or reboot or get a console prompt and do my job.
Ok, so these new HP machines have network connections to the service monitor. And they have all sort of new features in the service monitor which I don’t understand, like an LDAP server. I have no idea why I would need LDAP in the service monitor. And its got an SNMP server; ok, I somewhat go for that. And it has fancy graphical remote console, which I don’t need but I guess it’s good for the people who run Windows and can’t live without their hand on a mouse. So far so good.
So while I was out in Colorado I moved my remote modem from the old server to the new server. I plugged it into the serial port marked “console”. I didn’t have a chance to test it, so I’m doing that today. Doesn’t work. No problem, I’ll just get the documentation on how to do it. I ended up calling the HP support line because their new support website was not cooperating.
Here’s the bottom line. Second tier support says that using a modem attached to the service monitor is “no longer supported”. I can’t dial in to these computers with a modem. That’s a “feature” that every self respecting server has had since about 1980. The only way to do it, he says, is to get a mux card (a multi-port serial card) and then hang a modem off of that, as if I want to run some kind of an ISP setup(!)
Grr! Why would they add all this junk (LDAP, graphical remote console, blah blah blah) and take away something as simple as a dial-in console? That makes no sense at all.
grumble, grumble.
Now, frankly I think I can get it to work. They talk in their manual about using a laptop and connecting a serial cable so as to use hyperterminal to get into the service monitor. If you can do that then there must not be much left to figure out to hang a modem on the thing. But it will have to wait until my next visit out there. I’ll have to remember to take my selection of serial cables and null-modem thingys and all that jazz. Once I get the right combination then I will be back in business.
Or, I could just hang the modem off of a Dell box and not fuss with it. (For those not in the know, the Dell box costs about a third, or less, of the HP box and is supported and is reliable and don’t ask me if I should buy HP next time…)
Now that my rant is over, here is a nice picture of a rainbow taken while we were eating a picnic dinner at Spring Creek Park last week in Ft. Collins, CO.
