Info on the HP 712/60 PA/RISC workstation

Links

Suppliers

Operating Systems

Monitors

This machine requires a Sync-on-Green capable monitor, as opposed to the standard PC TTL Sync monitor. Sometimes a TTL monitor will work, but you'll see a severe green cast to the entire display.

These monitors are known to have a SOG mode:

• Philips Brilliance 15A
• Philips 105B (and the 105MB multimedia version)
• ...Doubtless many others

Monitor resoltion setting problems...

I screwed up and set the monitor resolution to something the monitor couldn't handle. Indeed, the best monitor in the place still couldn't deal with the resolution I'd set. So how to fix it? Boot the RISC box and press TAB. I don't know how many seconds after pressing power you should wait - but pressing tab dozens of times lets you cycle through all the resolutions available. Not the best user interface HP, but workable. The up shot - don't guess your monitor's capabilities!

Whats it running?

Yes - the HP PA RISC machine lives again. After being unable to log into HP-UX 9 I simply attached a SCSI cdrom drive and installed GNU/Linux, specifically the distro known as Debian. I used version 3.0 which is currently classed as stable. Debian is the only linux distro for hppa that currently exists. You can download the netinstall CD from the link above.

A word to the wise - if you intend to dual-boot linux and HP-UX you're best to have a separate hard drive for each OS. They don't play nice together.

Port scan against Linux

Here's the output of a portscan run against a linux install on the PA RISC box.

socks:~# nmap -O  192.168.200.3

Starting nmap 3.27 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2003-08-18 13:29 NZST
Interesting ports on 192.168.200.3:
(The 1614 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port       State       Service
9/tcp      open        discard
13/tcp     open        daytime
22/tcp     open        ssh
25/tcp     open        smtp
37/tcp     open        time
111/tcp    open        sunrpc
113/tcp    open        auth
515/tcp    open        printer
1024/tcp   open        kdm
Remote operating system guess: Linux Kernel 2.4.0 - 2.5.20
Uptime 2.887 days (since Fri Aug 15 16:12:31 2003)

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 6.881 seconds
socks:/vm/libcam# 

/proc entries

The PA RISC box running Linux is weird-as... Almost all the /proc entries contain something other than what the x86 linux geek expects. Check some of them out here...

Web browsers

The only web browser I found for hppa that works is dillo. Netscape/mozilla/konqueror/chimera2 don't work, and IE/opera aren't even available in the right variants.

This file last modified Sunday January 23, 2005

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