About This Book Linux on HP Integrity Servers covers the Linux operating system on HP Itanium-based systems, called the Integrity server family, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL.) This book starts out with extensive coverage of booting HP Integrity servers. These servers can run multiple operating systems so the boot process is important to understand. The boot process is substantially different than it is on HP Precision Architecture-based systems, called the HP 9000 family. The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is an important part of booting HP Integrity servers, so I spend a significant amount of time on EFI in Chapter 1. I then cover loading Linux on an HP Integrity system in Chapter 2. The installation is done in console-only mode since you may very well have an HP server without a graphics display on it. The graphics-based installation is nearly identical to that of loading an IA-32 system with Linux, so I didn't want to cover the same information that appears in many other Linux books. To load Linux on an HP Integrity server, you first load the HP Enablement Kit for Linux, which is a set of tools that provide a framework for installing, configuring, and recovering a Linux distribution on our Integrity servers. The kit is completely distribution agnostic, meaning that it is independent of a Linux distribution. You'll be loading Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) only in this book, but other Linux distributions can be loaded on some Integrity servers so the LEK needs to be independent of a specific Linux distribution. The program you'll use to bootstrap the Integrity server is provided as part of the HP Enablement Kit for Linux. This book then covers many additional system administration topics in the subsequent chapters. The versions of Linux that run on Integrity that are used in this book are types of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) family, including versions RHEL 3 and RHEL 2.1. The three members of the RHEL family are Advanced Server, Enterprise Server, and Workstation. The primary difference in these releases, at the time of this writing, has to do with their high-end capabilities. In the examples in this book I use RHEL Advanced Server because it supports greater than two CPUs, a lot of memory, and Itanium-based systems. There are also examples on IA-32 based systems that use other Red Hat releases. There are many Linux background chapters which apply to all Linux systems so the hardware platform, either Integrity servers or IA-32, is not important. Although the term Itanium is used throughout this book, the current implementation of Itanium is Itanium 2, I just shortened the name to Itanium for easier reading. You may also see the old name of IA-64 appear occassionally in screen shots, but I won't use IA-64 in my text. Other Linux distributions run on HP Integrity systems such as SuSE Linux enterprise server. I used Red Hat because this release was available at the time I began writing the book and many of my customers were evaluating Integrity servers running Red Hat. In addition to Linux, HP-UX, Windows Server 2003, and OpenVMS run on HP Integrity servers. Some of the book's examples show the boot process in which Linux, Windows, and HP-UX are all loaded on the same HP Integrity server. Different operating systems run in different hard partitions, called Node Partitions (nPartitions) on HP Integrity servers. This capability is new at the time of this writing and will be enhanced dramatically by HP in the coming months and years. This is the first revision of this book, but to keep up with the many advancements that will take place, you can expect several revisions to the book. I want to receive your feedback on this book and topics that you'd like to see covered in future revisions. Please send your thoughts to me at the following email address: marty.poniatowski@hp.com Linux Components This how-to book doesn't have a lot of background information in any of the chapters. This book illustrates how to get important tasks done. The next few pages provide some Linux background that covers the structure of Linux. Figure P-1 is a high-level depiction of a Linux system. Figure P-1 High-Level Linux System Structure Before describing this figure, note that everyone has a somewhat different way of viewing the components of Linux. This figure contains the most important components from a user perspective. At the heart of Figure P-1 is the hardware. Linux, in its many forms, now runs on many different types of hardware. I have melded the Integrity and IA-32 hardware on which Linux runs throughout this book and have pointed out the areas of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that are peculiar to HP Integrity servers. The next circle from the center of this diagram is the kernel. The kernel performs many functions including management of devices, memory, and processes; scheduling and execution of all commands; and containment of drivers that control system hardware. The kernel is an aspect of the system that system administrators spend a lot of time maintaining. When a new device is configured, a device driver may have to be added to the kernel to support the new device. There is also substantial tuning that can be performed to the kernel to optimize system performance for the application(s) running on the Linux system. Users have only indirect interaction with the kernel through the commands you issue that work their way to the kernel. The next circle is the shell. The shell takes commands from you and starts the process of executing the commands. In addition to passing commands to more inner layers of the system, the shell also allows you to run commands in the background and run shell programs. The next circle is the X Window System and the window manager that you run. There is a chapter in the book covering both GNOME and KDE. You usually don't see the graphical user interface as a separate circle in such Linux diagrams, because most of the work done in a graphical user interface works its way down to a shell command. Because most Linux users use a graphical user interface, this warrants its own circle. The final circle is the user. As a system administrator, you have access to all the components in the diagram. Another way to view Linux is on a distribution basis. Figure P-1 shows Linux in a generic way. You won't be using a generic Linux: you'll be using a specific distribution, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Advanced Server on your HP Integrity servers. Figure P-2 breaks down Linux components in the way in which you'd view them as part of a distribution. Figure P-2 High-Level Linux Distribution The high-level depiction of a Linux distribution in Figure P-2 has several components. On the far left is the Linux kernel, which is open-source software and serves as the basis for any Linux distribution. The center components consist of open source modules as well as distribution-specific enhancements. There may be, for instance, open-source system administration tools as well as distribution-specific adminstration tools that are part of a release. The components one the right are those specific to a distribution such as the support available. An additional consideration with Itanium and operating systems is byte ordering. This is often referred to as the endian of an architecture or operating system. Itanium doesn't care about byte ordering and can support both byte ordering methods. Operating systems that store the most significant byte in the leftmost position are big endian. Operating systems that store the most significant byte in the rightmost position are little endian. Linux is a little endian operating system. Linux and Windows are little endian and HP-UX is big endian. All these operating systems run on HP Integrity servers. Some examples in this book use the "retail" release of Red Hat version 8.x. The "retail" releases of Red Hat, such as 8.x, have been replaced by Fedora. Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open-source project. Fedora Core 2 is available at the time of this writing. Relevant URLs There are many Web sites that can assist you in your Linux system administration endeavors. I have listed some of the more prominent Linux-related Web sites below as they existed at the time of this writing: Extensible Firmware Interface: http://www.intel.com/technology/efi Technical documentation, including most all HP documents. Of particular interest at this site are documents on HP Linux Enablement Kit, and documents on HP Integrity servers: http://www.docs.hp.com Information on Itanium: http://www.hp.com/go/itanium IT Resource Center (This is essential for every HP-UX administrator): http://www.itrc.com Linux kernel archive: http://www.kernel.org RPM home page for package managment: http://www.rpm.org Red Hat Linux manuals: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/ The Linux Documentation Project: http://www.tldp.org GNOME desktop environment site: http://www.gnome.org/ Linux on Itanium: http://www.gelato.org An excellent iptables "how to" document is: http://www.linxguruz.org/iptables/howto Software depot home page: http://www.software.hp.com Instant Capacity on Demand (iCOD): http://www.hp.com/go/icod The International Association of HP Computing Professionals: http://www.interex.org Register name servers at: http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html. Information on Perl including sites to download Perl: http://www.perl.com The Perl Journal: http://www.tpj.com Site devoted to managing and promoting open source: http://www.opensource.org Linux documentation site: http://www.linuxdoc.org Office suite software: http://www.openoffice.org/ Web-based management software: http://www.webmin.com Rute's Linux tutorial: http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html Online Manual Pages Many times in this book, I refer to the online manual pages supplied with Linux. You can get the online manual page for a command by issuing man command_name. You can view an online manual page from a specific section by specifying the section number. To view the signal man page in section seven, you would issu...
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