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02/04/00 HP VISUALIZE WORKSTATIONS 2
this is not done, text files can become unreadable by the host system editor. However,
more sophisticated methods are available.
Moving up to the next level, the underlying network file system for NT is based on SMB
(System Message Block), whereas the file system for the HP-UX network is NFS
(Network File System). This discontinuity does not present a problem however, since
there are many alternative software packages available to transfer files over a mixed
network of UNIX and Windows NT systems.
The least obtrusive of these alternatives is the utilization of the ftp (File Transfer Protocol)
and rcp (Remote file CoPy) commands that are already familiar to UNIX users. These
utilities use their own protocol and thus don’t use either SMB or NFS. Of course ftp and
rcp are standard on HP-UX as both client and server. NT 4.0 has available both ftp and rcp
clients and an ftp service.
In addition, add-on utilities are available to allow HP-UX to access NT networked files
and NT to access HP-UX networked files. For instance, Advanced Server for UNIX
(licensed and sold by HP as Advanced Server/9000) allows HP-UX files and directories to
be accessed from an SMB based file system. Advanced Server includes other features,
such as security authentication, etc., which also help with system management and
interoperability. Other options include SAMBA, a freeware program, which allows access
to HP-UX resident data from an SMB based system. VisionFS is another SMB to NFS
gateway type product that runs on HP-UX.
NFS software, standard for UNIX environments, is packaged with HP-UX, but is not
natively available on NT. However, there are many vendors, such as Hummingbird
Communications Ltd. and Intergraph, that provide both NFS client and server software
packages for Windows NT allowing file access through this standard UNIX mechanism.
In addition to NFS, HP also offers the Distributed File System (DFS). DFS is available for
both HP-UX and NT and offers enterprise-wide file system access capabilities beyond
those of traditional NFS.
Although the above solutions support file transfer in a heterogeneous environment, this
does not necessarily mean that data in the file is interoperable with a given application on
either platform. The architecture of HP PA-RISC and HP-UX uses a byte ordering known
as big endian architecture, while Intel with Windows NT uses little endian architecture.
This can be addressed at the HP-UX application code level by using the “swab” routine to
adjust the byte ordering of the data.
Printing
Printing functionality is comparable between HP-UX and Windows NT. NT comes
standard with the means to access an HP-UX print spooler by utilizing both the remote
line printer (rlp) command on the NT system and line printer daemon (lpd) on the HP-UX
system. NT also comes with print monitors (similar to a print spooler daemon in HP-UX)
for other print spooler hosts. Finally, the NT system has a print monitor for Data Link
Control (DLC) protocol, which allows access to printers directly connected to the network.
From the HP-UX workstation side, printers spooled from a Windows NT system can be
accessed via the rlp command on HP-UX. Windows NT has the lpd service (LPDSVC)
available to allow HP-UX clients to print through NT. However, there is one note of