Tuesday, November 17, 2009

HP-UX Community Links

Okay... over time I've accumulated a few HP-UX resources, here is what I've stumbled upon up until now. I'll keep this post updated, so send me your comments.

Of course, I couldn't start the list without mentioning the ITRC forums which replaced the trusted HP-UX sysadmin list in functionality. Unfortunately, the interface and features have not evolved much in, what, 10 years, which limits its outreach to a database of questions and answers. Some regulars over there do put a community spirit in the HP-UX forum, but over the years I've seen a decrease in the quality of many of the questions and I don't participate as much as I used to. Furthermore, any post that is too critical of HP or its products can get deleted by a moderator, which overcomes an important aspect of having a community-driven independent site.

The real "community" effort should logically comme from Connect and they have an Enterprise Unix SIG (special interest group) and HP-UX group. However, even though they are linked from the ITRC forums, these groups are not very active. Their web interface has a lot of usability problems, which might not encourage anyone wanting to start a discussion there.

I've been surprised to find an HP-UX group on Linkedin, though, it has a group named "HP-UX users" which counts 600 people, and seems to be quite active. Facebook has an "HP-UX" group too but almost nobody posts anything there. I think Linkedin is much better suited to this usage.

Now to blogs. I've found a few people who run HP-UX-related blogs, likewise to mine. Some have RSS feeds you can subscribe to.
Victor Balogh
Steven Protter (a top ITRC member)
Daniel Parkes

I also subscribe to the blog "Musings on Mission Critical Computing", which isn't very technical inbut shows an insight into where top people at HP could be steering HP-UX.

On Twitter, I found a lot of HP feeds available. One of them is named HP_UX_Docs who posts liks to recent documentations and community resources. Well worth subscribing to.

O.

2 comments:

Juanma said...

Hi Olivier,

I have a couple more links for your list:

http://thomasvogt.wordpress.com/ - It only has a few posts but almost all of them are about HP-UX.

http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/ - It's not exclusevely about HP-UX but it has very interesting posts.

The last one is only in spanish, but it is probably the only spanish resource about HP-UX. It features posts about HP-UX, linux and Windows system administration.

http://digilux.es/

Hope you find them useful. This post inspire me and I'm goiing to try to write a blog about HP-UX and other technical stuff.

Please continue with your great blog.
Juanma.

Olivier S. Masse said...

Thanks Juanma!

If you start your own blog, send me a link -- I'll try to keep my community links list updated over time.

Olivier