Yes, everything at CERN, at least in the 2000s, was in AFS. Fermilab was also using AFS extensively.

I remember compiling AFS from source for Scientific Linux 3.x because there was a weird bug that didn't let the machines mount AFS when they were integrated with LCG (before it was renamed to WLCG: https://wlcg.web.cern.ch/)

Oh my... this comment really dates me...

My university still does! Though they're replacing it next year.

> The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture.

This sounds cool, but I've wondered - couldn't you just stick something like

  export $PATH=/nfs/bin/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m):$PATH

(I'm actually doing something like this myself; I don't (yet) have AFS or NFS strongly in play in my environment, but of all things I've resorted to this trick to pick out binaries in ~/.local/bin when using distrobox, because Alpine and OpenSUSE are not ABI compatible)

> Did anyone use AFS (Andrew File System)?

Glances round to see if there's any alumni from a certain Large Investment Bank also present...

My university was similar (SGI, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun, Linux, SCO), but they used NFS to mount home dirs local to the computer clusters, which wasn't as cool because it wasn't possible to mount home dir volumes remotely like an AFS campus. They also, unfortunately, used original NIS which could easily extract all password hashes of all users with a simple `getent passwd`. I proceeded to run John The Ripper against a dump of everyone and found 60 passwords in 30 seconds, including several tenured professors.

Those were the days when portability and longevity were important and there wasn't as much of a monoculture or incompatible code/language features churn.

>Did anyone use AFS (Andrew File System)?

Yes. URZ (university data center) of Heidelberg University, circa 2005. No idea if they are still using it, but it seemed to work fine at the time.

I wish we had more options. AFS never left the laboratory and stuff like AFP and whatever Novell had died a slow death.

I have the impression we stalled on NFS and CIFS and I don't think webdav and s3 are good replacements because those don't respect file system ACLs.

NFS would be great if you didn't had to chose between KDC infrastructure or "trust me bro I'm uid 501".

I tried it back when obsd included a client, hooking into the public list was amazing, you could almost see an alternate web in there but based on the unix filesystem instead of http. unfortunately afs was dropped in 5.2

The big disappointment for me at the time was that obsd did not also include a server component so it was comparatively much more difficult to use afs in your own infrastructure. The lesson being always make the effort to include the server side if possible. Without that you feel like a second class citizen.

bind under 9front it's far more powerful.

I agree that LVM in HP-UX was far ahead of Linux back in the day. To be fair some of those advanced features in HP-UX LVM required an additional license (eg: mirroring required Enterprise Operating Environment). I haven't touched HP-UX in like 10 years however.

I remember the hours gcc needed to compile itself on those HP servers. We needed it for all the programs that would not compile with HP's cc. We also installed some GNU userland utilities because, as you wrote, they were better than the ones in HP-UX. Those were the years around 1990.

And documentation, apparently no longer to be found on public HP sites, after all their reboots as companies.

Occasionally I find some stuff via search engine, mostly random.

I very rarely read man pages (similarly gnu info) on Linux nowadays, whoever they're written for isn't me.

Superior alternatives:

* tldr/tealdeer - usually just a pile of typical usage examples, almost always covers what I want

* jfgi because surely someone has tried to do this before and asked about it on an ancient forum

* llms - regurgitating the info from above, possibly with the bonus of letting it try a script on a sandbox and then entering a error-confusion loop

* source - documentation can be wrong or incomplete, but the source never lies

Mine is labelled "humber" and came from another chiark user ;)

I would say SunOS (i.e. pre Solaris SysV and not including it) was the quality bearer for UNIX in that era. Particularly once they did the Unified Buffer Cache; HP-UX was never able to accomplish this and it makes it not an ideal file server amongst other problems.

HP-UX 10 and 11 progressively imported more SysV code and lost some of the charm that 9.x has.

I find AIX to be fascinating. Especially 3.x against contemporaries with its LVM, and a pageable kernel. A lot of people have snap judgements against it because they saw 'smit' but don't really understand anything about it.

>Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers

Agreed, the university I worked HP systems cost was the major reason Computing Center Sun was purchased, though we had stray discount price purchased units of almost all vendors too.

We did have one HP 3000/MPE running library VTLS quite long time. I can't remember its exact model any more. But was first 160cm heights rack filling old system and then later replaced with some 9000/E35 matching size smallish (a thick and very heavy PC) size smaller 3000 series box. I did not manage that, but helped its sysadmin with his 9-track autoloader issues couple of times. I would have certainly recycled that tape unit to another use, but it was HP-IB (IEEE 488 / GPIB) connected like whole rack filled with disks all daisy-chained were easy to believe not having been cheap. Too bad it was so hard to get GPIB adapter working with other systems. Those terminals used with MPE having local edit buffer were weird, as was HP Roman character set used. All so well built that was a shame to let the go when VTLS was retired about 30 years ago.

Maths department did have better funding to get few HP-UX running long time. Only HP-UX we had at CC was C160 workstation running OpenView NMS, but that's it.

Yes and commercial side (a telco vendor) I did work customer demanded HP and there were very few Sun servers. It was only used if and when software was not at all available for HP-UX. What I recall Ericsson switching systems tended to come with Sun/Solaris and Lucent 5ESS HP/HP-UX that time.

A friend of mine went SF some conference, I don't recall year. But he came back with HP brand sunglasses which HP gave all visiting their booth and told "Remember, not to look at Sun" :D

>Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers. And thus smaller ability to promote its innovations or be selected because of them.

Columbia University during the 1990s was a SunOS/Solaris shop (and, before then, VAX <https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/>). My first year, AcIS (Academic Information Systems, IT for faculty/students) set up a single computer lab in the engineering building <https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...> with HP workstations. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course.

The boxes used the same Kerberos authentication as the Sun systems, so I presume I must have been using context-dependent filesystems for binaries when logging into the systems locally, or when I chose to remote log into one specifically from elsewhere (just for novelty's sake; I preferred the Sun cluster, or the Sun box dedicated to staff use).

MAE—the raison d'etre for the HP boxes—was slow and unstable, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced HP, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.

I seem to remember something like that in DG/UX too.

I totally missed the EOL announcement. Not that I use it, but it is one on the few last big proprietary Unix. I thought their will always be enough paying customers to maintain it (even if sold to third party).

It reminds me a little of a thing used in clustering of DECs (later HPs) Tru64 Unix.

The clusters had a shared OS image - that is a single, shared root filesystem for all members. To allow node-specific config files, there was a type of symbolic link called a “Context Dependent Symbolic Link” (CDSL). They were just like a normal symlink, but had a `{memb}` component in the target, which was resolved at runtime to the member ID of the current system. These would be used to resolve to a path under `/cluster/members/{memb}`, so each host could have its own version of a config file.

The single shared root filesystem made upgrades and patching of the OS extra fun. There was a multi-phase process where both old and new copies of files were present and hosts were rebooted one at a time, switching from the old to the new OS.

It's too bad they went to Windows later on. Having the Unix environment available makes the older stuff really flexible.

If it's the model I'm thinking of, it's basically a 9000/712. An easy way to get a PA-RISC workstation from someone who doesn't realize what it actually is. :)

The C in CDE is “common” because it was a collaboration between the major Unix vendors on a standard for how Unix desktops worked.

CDE was based heavily on VUE. If you read the CDE source code, you'll find many references to VUE.