1 Chapter 1. Booting (PDC, ISL, hpux), Secure Web Console, GSP Configuration Background In the first few sections of this chapter, I want to give you an overview of the low-level boot and configuration of an HP 9000, setting up HP Secure Web Console, and then configuring the Guardian Service Processor (GSP). You might perform these in the opposite order in which I present them. I chose to cover boot first, however, because it is an area of much confusion for new system admin- istrators. Not everyone has a Secure Web Console, so I decided to cover this second. Securing your Guardian Service Processor can be done after the system boots, so I cover this third. The system used In the examples in this chapter is an L-Class system. I intentionally used a simple system so we could concentrate on the boot process with a minimum amount of hardware-related messages. Reviewing the boot process in this chapter won't make you an HP Customer Engineer (CE) or take the place of any formal training; however, knowing a little of what is going on "pre- operating system" may be helpful. In addition, if you are an experienced UNIX system administrator but haven't before used an HP 9000, these sections will serve as a introduction to booting a system. Since booting varies from system to system, even within the HP 9000 family, this is not a compre- hensive study, but rather an overview. Boot Process Overview The boot process on an HP 9000 system can be reduced in its simplist form to three steps. I'll provide a quick description of the three steps and then we'll take a look at some example boot processes so we can see these three steps in action. The following is a description of the three steps: PDC HP 9000 systems come with firmware installed called Processor Dependent Code (PDC - man page pdc). After the system is powered on or the processor is RESET, the PDC runs self test operations and initializes the processor. PDC also identifies the console path so it can provide messages and accept input. PDC would then begin the "autoboot" process unless you were to interrupt it during the 10-second interval that is supplied. If you interrupt the "autoboot" process, you can issue a variety of commands. The interface to PDC commands is called the Boot Console Handler (BCH.) This is sometimes a point of confusion; that is, are we issuing PDC commands or BCH commands? The commands are normally described as PDC commands and the interface through which you execute them is the BCH.