Conference debut now checked off Craig's list

HP's 3000 business manager Jennie Hou had just announced the latest e3000 Contributor Award winner. After giving hearty congratulations to Stan Sieler of Allegro Consultants (pictured at left), Hou introduced another new but seasoned element to the 3000 community: Craig Fairchild, selected to begin to fill the "very big shoes," as he said, of retired 3000 engineer Jeff Vance.

Fairchild (pictured below, keeping the faith at the HP e3000 booth at the conference), has been working on the HP 3000 since 1985. He rolled into his presentation like he's been ready for more than 20 years to communicate directly with customers. His first mission in HP's 3000 update meeting was to introduce the SCSI pass through drivers for MPE/iX, a bit of engineering coming to a 7.5 beta test patch near you.

Part of Fairchild's duties will be reminding the community about opportunities such as this driver, software which will let HP 3000s utilize storage devices that haven't been officially certified as 3000 peripherals. All support bets are off, but at least the lack of a 4GB drive from HP's parts list won't keep a 3000 offline, thanks to the driver.

Fairchild was introducing another example of the sort of technology Vance offered up often: designs for the future of using a 3000, no matter how long that future looks to a customer. He stepped to the microphone apologizing for a voice weak after ferrying schoolkids on a lengthy trek last week. But his ease and affability spoke even louder.

"It's designed to teach SCSI devices new tricks," Fairchild said of the driver to be in beta test during the second half of 2007. The device driver makes use of the Posix IOCTL command to send and receive data from the SCSI device.

In fact, the engineering is even more clever than that. Fairchild pointed out that the device file actually talks to the physical path of the device, not just the device itself. HP created an external use for an existing diagnostic interface to create the SCSI Pass Through, which it calls SPT for short.

Fairchild emulated Vance's candor, too. "Using the SPT is not for the timid," he said. "You'll need to know a lot about the device you're talking to." He was talking to a room full of IT do-it-yourselfers, but the caution took its deserved place in the afternoon. So did Fairchild, warming up for a long stretch run as the man to follow Jeff Vance and lead new HP efforts into the community.

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Conference debut now checked off Craig's list

HP's 3000 business manager Jennie Hou had just announced the latest e3000 Contributor Award winner. After giving hearty congratulations to Stan Sieler of Allegro Consultants (pictured at left), Hou introduced another new but seasoned element to the 3000 community: Craig Fairchild, selected to begin to fill the "very big shoes," as he said, of retired 3000 engineer Jeff Vance.

Fairchild (pictured below, keeping the faith at the HP e3000 booth at the conference), has been working on the HP 3000 since 1985. He rolled into his presentation like he's been ready for more than 20 years to communicate directly with customers. His first mission in HP's 3000 update meeting was to introduce the SCSI pass through drivers for MPE/iX, a bit of engineering coming to a 7.5 beta test patch near you.

Part of Fairchild's duties will be reminding the community about opportunities such as this driver, software which will let HP 3000s utilize storage devices that haven't been officially certified as 3000 peripherals. All support bets are off, but at least the lack of a 4GB drive from HP's parts list won't keep a 3000 offline, thanks to the driver.

Fairchild was introducing another example of the sort of technology Vance offered up often: designs for the future of using a 3000, no matter how long that future looks to a customer. He stepped to the microphone apologizing for a voice weak after ferrying schoolkids on a lengthy trek last week. But his ease and affability spoke even louder.