Jonathan Pallant got lucky and managed to score a massive haul of ’90s UNIX workstations, one of which was an HP 9000 Model 340, a HP-UX workstation built around a Motorola 68030 processor at 16.7 MHz. It doesn’t come with a hard drive or even a floppy controller, though, so he decided to borrow a PA-RISC-based HP 9000 Model 705 to set up an HP-UX 9 cluster. But wait, how does that work, when we’re dealing with two entirely different architectures?
What’s more fun though, is putting it into a cluster with the Model 705 and network booting it.
Yes, that a 68030 machine network booting from a PA-RISC machine … and sharing the same root filesystem. But aren’t PA-RISC binaries and 68K binaries quite different? Oh yes, they really are. So, how does that work?
↫ Jonathan Pallant
HP-UX is far more interesting and fascinating than a lot of people give it credit for, and while my interest lies with HP-UX 11i, I find what Pallant is doing here with HP-UX 9 just as fascinating. You first need to install HP-UX 9 for PA-RISC on the 700 series machine, convert it to a cluster server, and then install HP-UX 9 for 68k on top of that PA-RISC installation. After this is done, you effectively end up with a single root file system that contains both PA-RISC and 68k binaries, and you can network boot the 68k-based Model 340 right from it – using the same root filesystem on both machines.
Absolutely wild.
Nintendo Direct to Deliver First The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Trailer Later This Week