Stream problems on HP-UX 10.20

We have a new HP-UX 10.20 server (HP9000). Question 1: it says it handles streams so we used ipcstr. However when we set it we cannot initialise the database, oninit and oninit -i does not work. ipcshm works fine though so we are using it now. we have checked the sqlhosts file and we have checked the /etc/services file all seems to be correct an no clashes, we even checked the protocols file and all other related files. what could be wrong? we also use soctcp, could that affect it in any way? Question 2: We added information on another informax server in the sqlhosts file. The second server is primary for development, and stand by. All hosts,host.equiv, services and protocol files we updated and check for errors. We found that because we have updated the hosts.equiv file we need to update the .netrc file also, however we needed a local copy of the .netrc file in the informix directory in order for use to be able to conect to the other servers engine. According to Informaix this should not be needed, but just modifying the roots(unix) .netrc file just does not seem to work. what have we done wrong, but because we got it to work, informix support seems content. Is there another way as we don't like the idea of having the informix password in the .netrc file. any help is appriciated. thanks.