UNIX Administratosphere

The venerable HP-UX utility SAM is now deprecated as of HP-UX 11v3, and in its stead is the System Manager Homepage (SMH). In HP-UX 11v3, SAM gives a message about being deprecated, then runs SMH. In HP-UX 11v4 (whenever that comes along) there will be no SAM.

The SMH requires a browser (such as Mozilla or Firefox) and a web server (Apache) to be installed, and certain plugins also require Java and Apache Tomcat. The text-based user interface is still there, but it is a basic (and usable) interface - no fancy windows (shucks). The requirements are indeed quite heavy for a server install - one of the very first things to do on a server when installing (and securing) is to strip out everything possible (and most especially complex network servers). Sigh.

Heavy or not, HP-UX does include all of these products on the distribution DVDs, so installing them isn’t a big deal - it’s just that when you want to strip things down to the basics, it becomes difficult when the developer of the software keeps increasing what you need to run.  Oh, well - it’ll be pretty.