3000 NewsWire

HP releases critical patches to prevent corruption

HP released critical patches today which repair problems in the HP 3000 file system, a fix for any Large Files — which in rare circumstances, can corrupt data on a 3000. While the odds of the bug corrupting data in one case are technically 800 million to 1, HP is recommending that all customers who use MPE/iX 6.5, 7.0 and 7.5 install one or both of the patches at the earliest opportunity. The patches can be staged, but they will require a reboot of the 3000, an event that is rare at many sites.

The HP repairs, announced today just after 10 AM Pacific time through the HP 3000 newsgroup, the OpenMPE mailing list and HP Web pages, include the first fix for the 3000's millicode in 16 years, according to Bill Cadier of HP's MPE/iX labs. The millicode patch, which replaces the MILL.LIB.SYS file, is only needed if a customer's applications access mapped files and utilize Large Files.

Large Files are any which are 4GB or greater in size. HP introduced the feature in March, 2000. Applications which have not been modified since March 29, 2000 should be safe from the potential corruption. The possible corruption can occur if any one of five of the last six bytes of a Large File fail to transfer correctly.

Customers who sort these types of files, using calls to HSORTOUTPUT or SORT.PUB.SYS, are at risk according to the HP notice for the patches. The potential risk and the repair surfaced when an HP 3000 customer notified HP of a data corruption issue.

Some customers will have applications which must be recompiled and re-linked to eliminate the problem. An application that uses the HPFOPEN intrinsic, and creates or uses Large Files, is a candidate for this kind of repair. In some instances a customer must locate and use the application's source code for this kind of re-compile. HP defined the procedure as an install of the millicode patch, then a recompile of the application in some cases.

The majority of the 3000 community will be installing patch MPENX11, which is available to all 3000 sites at HP's IT Response Center Web site and also through telephone support. Customers with applications using Large Files will install patch MILNX10. But the millicode patch is important, too, because a sort of a Large File of 2-3 GB will create a temporary Large File of more than 4GB, where the risk of corruption is at hand.

HP's strong advice is for customers to install both patches. [There is] a high priority for MPENX11, since it is the patch that addresses the issues with SORT and the MPE/iX OS. However, MILNX10 is also important to address the possibility of continuing to use the millicode in question. Even if a customer is not using Large Files today, there is no guarantee that they won't experience growth that will cause their files to cross into the large range at some later time.

The primary link to details of the critical process has been posted at HP's e3000 Web site, www.hp.com/go/e3000. At that page, a customer letter link as well as a link to the HP Jazz Web server provides a detailed page with explicit instructions — as well as a new HP-built utility to detect Large Files on an HP 3000.

HP's announcement takes place four years to the day that the company ended sales of the HP 3000. The development of this type of patch, a binary-level repair, will continue throughout 2009 and 2010, according to HP's 3000 community liaison Craig Fairchild.

While it might be easy to overstate the crucial directives for the patches — HP has rarely announced this kind of bug with repairs and white papers already available — the data corruption is very rare, Fairchild said.

In our evaluation, we've been looking at this problem and analyzing HP's [own] code to try to determine what's at risk," he said. "It's very uncommon to be working with Large Files. It's even more uncommon  to be working with Large Files using user-mapped access to those files. It's even more rare yet again to be doing these very small data movements that happen to be at the very end of a space."

Fairchild explained that what an application is doing IO to a large file, "you're not doing it in six-byte chunks, or five bytes or four bytes, three or two." Most common is IO one page at a time, which presents no risk for corruption at a minimum of 4,000 bytes.

HP has a FILECHEK utility, just developed, to scan for the Large Files on a system. But the LINKEDIT tool, already on every 3000, can help assess the risk to customers with home-grown or in-house applications.

"LINKEDIT can provide a list of all the external procedures, calls by a program, or an XL or RL library," Fairchild said. "If when looking through the procedures, HPFOPEN is not called by a program, then you know that application is not at risk."

Clock up patched support's value

HP still has about 48 hours to go before it might reply to OpenMPE's request to open up the HP 3000's source code. Only one value stands out as the chief benefit for such a license of MPE/iX to a third party: patches, and the ability of a non-HP entity to create or modify such modules of the operating system.

As of this morning, patch delivery and creation looks like the most obvious difference in service levels between HP's 3000 support and that of third parties. Even then, patches that are already released — beyond beta testing — can still be downloaded and used today, even if HP never begins its source code transfer for MPE/iX.

OpenMPE wants HP to announce something by Nov. 1 about starting the source code handover. The transfer should take about a year, by everybody's estimates. The OpenMPE advocates say that patch creation will be important to the 3000 customer who operates the system beyond December of 2008, when HP ends its patching operations. That means getting ready to patch should begin by the end of 2007.

But this weekend illustrates one of the few instances where a patch is necessary to run an HP 3000 safely. On Saturday evening around much of the world the clocks roll back, away from Daylight Saving Time. On a new weekend, for most countries. This is what passes for a critical patch in the days when many HP 3000s are locked down, frozen with few changes allowed.

Many third party support companies refer to patching any 3000 as a last-resort strategy. This is no slam against HP's engineering capability, but the belt-plus-suspenders credo which built the 3000 into the industry's most reliable business server. Any workaround, support companies say, brings a lot less chance for disruption than a patch.

HP was careful to note in its announcement last month that not even security-related patches will be developed inside HP labs from 2009 onward for the 3000. Those patches are rare, too. Many of the Denial of Service kinds of exploits won't cripple an HP 3000 like they might an HP Unix system. HP built things like Domain Name Services on a different OS architecture, so the many security alerts for HP-UX just don't have MPE/iX counterparts. A security breach is never impossible, but the 3000 comes closer to being safe by design instead of protected by patch.

HP support does offer experienced engineers and lab-level advice, but these are values that a third party could equal, given the right personnel. Former HP lab engineers are already at work in many third party companies, some supplying support. For a system like the 3000, which is pretty much frozen in time at HP, there's not very much to keep abreast of that would be impossible outside HP's labs.

Corner cases and corporate requirements carry much of the HP support value in the days to come. The right sized customer will be able to have patches created, once a services contract for the project can be worked out, so a corner case doesn't crater a corporation. And those corporations that demand that the HP badge appear on a mission-critical server's support agreement? They will be needing HP's support value as long as the vendor is willing to sell it.

But while the time rolls back this weekend on the world's clocks, the 3000 community should be looking for the commonplace, everyday value in patches for the system. HP seems to believe that patches are a key value in support. OpenMPE's efforts to assume patch operations looks like it backs up that HP belief. 3000 customers who look at their clocks on Monday morning might want to recall how long it's been since any MPE/iX patch has been so crucial.

Comparing next solutions for 3000s

When a 3000 utility goes dark — because its creator has dropped MPE/iX operations, or the trail to the support business for the tool has grown faint — the 3000 community can serve up alternatives quickly. A mature operating system and experienced users offer options that are hard to beat.

Such was the case last week when Walter Murray, a former HP development engineer now with the California Dept. of Corrections IT staff, wondered about an alternative for Aldon Computing's SCOMPARE. That development tool has compared source files for more than 15 years in the HP 3000 world. There was no record of a valid license on the Murray's server for How now to compare, Murray wondered.

Not for long. Within 24 hours the experts on the HP 3000 mailing list offered six alternatives to the now-defunct SCOMPARE. Resource 3000 partner Allegro Consultants offers a free MPE/iX solution in SCOM, as verified by Allegro's Steve Cooper:

And, it's free, too!

www.allegro.com/software/hp3000/allegro.html

and scroll down to "SCOM."

Other candidates included a compare UDC from Robelle, GNU Diff, diff in the HP 3000's Posix environment, DiffDaff on Windows, and more.

Bruce Collins of Softvoyage offered details on using diff in Posix:

run diff.hpbin.sys;info="FILE1 FILE2"

The file names use HFS syntax so they should be entered in upper case. If the files aren't in the current account or group they should be entered as /ACCOUNT/GROUP/FILE

Donna Garverick-Hofmeister, after verifying that Aldon is still in business, but not the MPE/iX business, offered a tip on using Robelle's compare UDC:

Regarding Robelle's compare.  Being a scripting advocate, I strongly recommend adapting their UDC into a script.... and take a few seconds to add a wee bit of help text to the script, to make life more enjoyable for all (which *is* the reason for scripting, yes?)

In Microsoft's Visual Studio lies a tool called windiff, reported Larry Simonsen. Another former HP engineer, Lars Appel, brought up a Linux option in the KDE development environment:

On Linux, if you are using KDE, you might also find Kompare handy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompare (see screenshot)

On MPE, as others mentioned, there is still the Posix diff in two flavours: the HP supplied in /bin and the GNU version that lives in /usr/local/bin. The former allows two output formats (diff and diff -c), the latter also allows “diff -u” in addition.

Oh, regarding /bin/diff on MPE... I sometimes got “strange” errors (like “file too big”) from it when trying to compare MPE record oriented files. A workaround was to use tobyte (with -at options) to created bytestream files for diff’ing.

Appel was even able to address a concern of Murray's: "Then there’s the problem of comparing numbered files, like COBOL source files, when one or both files have been renumbered."

With Posix tools, one might use cut(1) with -c option to “peel off” the line number columns before using diff(1) for comparing the “meat”. Something in the line of ... /bin/cut -c7-72 SourceFile1 > BodyText1.

Murrary reported back at the end of the 24 hours to say that Aldon knew of HP 3000s and the licensing mechanisms, "and it sounds as though they are still willing to sell SCOMPARE and support contract for it." Which says something about the vigor of the 3000's ecosystem, six years after HP predicted its demise.

Ubuntu option opens for Linux

Pete Eggers, an MPE/iX veteran looking toward the next best operating environment, describes himself as a Linux bigot. Not long ago he echoed another 3000 expert in recommending Ubuntu, a distro of Linux as a newly-polished tech tool.

Vista got you down?  Slow on last generation hardware?  Can’t load it on old hardware?  Just need the basics including a full featured office suite?  Or, a bunch more applications (18,000), but don’t have money to burn?

Give Ubuntu 7.10 a try!  Comes in a LiveCD version (runs completely from a bootable CD without need of even 1 disk).

Earlier this year we interviewed Matt Perdue, Hill Country Technologies support specialist and an OpenMPE board member. Ubuntu was on his list of tools to assist in 3000 administration. He'd even gotten the Linux distro to boot up on PA-RISC hardware.

Eggers offered an outside look at the Linux distro, along with a note about the 7.10 release.

Here is an O’Reilly review link:

Yes, I know CentOS distribution is great, ultra-reliable (just repackaged RHEL), and easy to setup as a server.  Not bad as a programmer’s workstation too.  But it is really dull, uses old reliable software versions, missing features as desktop as delivered, and time consuming to setup and configure as a full blown jazzy end-user desktop.  If you are a disgruntled Vista user, Ubuntu is the Linux distribution to try first.

Doubletree rooms full, but Meet has space for now

A few days ago we reported that the Doubletree Hotel, San Francisco Airport, was now full — and so anybody headed for the HP e3000 Community Meet, Bayside will have to stay elsewhere.

But we didn't mean the Meet was full up, just the hotel where the meetings take place. At last check, about 20 slots were still open for the meeting that will connect HP 3000 customers and partners for the only time in 2007. In person, anyway. There's a 50-person limit for the event.

The Meet's organizers only needed to reserve a 12-room block in the hotel, and that's now full. That hotel is convenient to the SFO airport, and the Nov. 17 Meet date falls over a weekend — so now the Doubletree is full. That's not the case yet at the Red Roof Inn, across Anza Boulevard from the Doubletree. See our entry from Tuesday to get Red Roof contact details.

More bonus for the attendees: Jon Diercks, author of The MPE/iX System Administration Handbook — best book ever on managing a 3000 — will be leaving some copies for attendees to win, I suppose. Somehow we'll get the books to several attendees.

Phone calls and e-mails are starting to come in now about attending. We've even heard that Vesoft's Vladimir Volokh will be in the area that weekend. It's bound to be a productive and fun networking event.

Because make no mistake, that's what the meet is all about. Yes, there will be some opportunity to promote a solution to a site — or a partner. But this is about the community aspect of the marketplace. In a year with no 3000-focused user conference, or any other kind of MPE/iX experts event, this weekend is as good at it gets.

And you'll get a t-shirt, too. How many HP 3000 t-shirts have been released since 2004? How many HP 3000 systems have gotten a performance upgrade, or had their horsepower restored to its full PA-RISC potential?

We think the answer to the first question is at least one. As for the second question, that has been "none" even as OpenMPE has asked HP to liberate the A-Class and N-Class processing cycles. Maybe something to discuss at the Meet, or over a supper afterward.

Hope to see you there. There may be no room at the inn, but there's still room at the Meet.

What 2008 means to migration

HP told customers last month that it will extend its product support for the HP 3000 through 2010, although the two years beyond 2008 will not include any new MPE/iX patches. One reason for the extension: Customers need more time to migrate. Sometimes those delays are completely unavoidable.

The County of Roanoke in Virginia is moving its governmental applications off their HP 3000. Just about a month before HP extended its support date, 2008 was looking like a very rigorous deadline for IT director Diana Wilson. She had reported back in 2004 the county expected to be all migrated by 2006. We checked back in with her and several other migration-bound customers.

Our current schedule puts us out to 2008. We lost about a  year of time when one of the new software vendors went bankrupt while we were in the middle of implementation (we are purchasing vendor applications to replace all of the HP 3000 apps). This caused us to have to start all over with the bid and  award process for those applications.

Yesterday's story about delays due to vendor changes offers counsel on what to do when a new app provider leaves your radar screen — or has its flight pattern changed by an acquisition.

Wilson reported the county's plans to us a month before HP's most recent extension of support, making reference to the 2008 deadline the 3000 community understood at the time.

We've now selected vendors for all of the remaining applications and have implementation and deployment schedules for each. Our schedule is aggressive, but so far it looks like we will be able to meet the 2008 deadline.

There are other customers who see HP's extension of support as a reason to keep the 3000 on the support price list indefinitely. There are no firm numbers to examine about HP's 3000 support revenues or profits. HP doesn't release these figures, so the rumors of $100 million annually in service contracts and more than $20 million in profits will just have to remain rumors, unverified. HP Services is one of several HP operating groups who have a say in how long HP will stay in the 3000 business.

But one customer who replied to our story about the extension of HP support made his case without referencing what might be in it for HP's bottom line.

"I think they should do it indefinitely," said Michael Caplin of Aero Corporation, manufacturers of safety products. "HP can freeze software updates and software support, but what's the harm in supporting the hardware?  It's the least they can do after abandoning the very customers who put them where they are today."

Rooms filling for Bayside Meet

HP e3000 Community Meet organizer Alan Yeo reports that the $99 rooms for next month's 2007 meet at the Doubletree Hotel San Francisco Airport have sold out — but there's still an alternative nearby that's just as affordable.

And we do mean right nearby. The Red Roof Inn, just across Anza Boulevard and next door to the Doubletree, has $80-$90 per night lodging available as of this evening. Reservations can be made at 1-800-REDROOF or 650-342-7772. Or online at the hotel chain's Web site, www.redroof.com/reservations/index.asp

The Meet takes place in meeting rooms at the Doubletree, starting at 9 on Saturday. Both hotels have free shuttle service to and from the San Francisco airport.

To register for the free Nov. 17 lunch and the all-day talks and networking, browse to the Meet's Web site at hpmigrations.com/sfevent.  Stick around after lunch and get your free copy of the HP 3000 Evolution handbook, compiled and published by Robelle.

What you should seek after a merger

HP 3000 customers migrate through a field of choices these days. And these are days of consolidation in the applications industry, especially on the platforms of Unix and other enterprise-only solutions. We keep hearing stories about the gap between promises and performance, between deadline and delays, while 3000 sites search for replacement applications.

This kind of disconnect rears its head highest when a prospective supplier gets acquired. Terri Glendon Lanza, one of the ERP community's top consultants, used the MANMAN mailing list to share an article from the APICS News about what to expect and what to ask when your new app provider, creating a replacement application, suddenly gets a new parent.

Lanza quoted the article Does Anyone Care by Al Bukey, founder of ABCO Engineering

The client asked me to provide advice on how to handle the situation when mergers and acquisitions cause the recently acquired vendors to respond late and have their decision-making capabilities interrupted, despite repeated assurances. The comforting words and assurances from the vendor that everything will be for the better should be taken cautiously.

Support is promised for every acquired product, at first. MANMAN, the ERP solution of longest tenure in the 3000 community, even got a "we'll support it until the bolts fall out" pledge from new owner SSA Global several years ago. SSA is now part of Infor, and we're not sure where all those bolts have gone today.

Bukey summarizes this kind of situation and tells what to expect:

Eventually, this new software vendor will ask its customers to move to the new platform or encourage them to do so by increasing the cost of support and maintenance. Sometimes the support will be completely cut off, or some other impediment will arise. While support may continue to be offered in some form or another, the cost will reach a point where most companies will have to decide to change from the current situation.

In some cases, when the acquired or merged company has a strong offering and a satisfied user community, a slightly different approach may be taken. As a client, you will get support regardless.

No company is immune from an eventual merger or acquisition, therefore, no decision is safe today. This is one of the reasons end users steadily push concepts such as open source and standards. It is also a strong driver of new technologies such as the new service-oriented architecture (SOA) where the hope is that any new functionality needed in the future may not necessarily have to come from the original supplier.

Observe who paints the 3000's past

The City of Brownsville is leaving their HP 3000, walking away from a 13-year HP partnership to join the ranks of IBM IT customers. Big Blue scoops sites away from HP all the time, and the opposite is true, too. But the motivation for moving off the 3000 platform often has more to do with its applications than the operating environment, or the hardware which hosts it.

Brownsville is being profiled in this month's issue of Texas Technology, a mailed and online information source that promises to be "the leading magazine providing solutions to Texas government in the information age." A freelance article by an Austin writer gave Brownsville's MIS director the article's leading role in moving the city off its 3000 and onto an IBM solution. But Gail Bruciak might have been repeating what IBM had to say when she assessed the future of the 3000 which is still running at the city.

"We're running everything for the city, with the exception of emergency services, on an HP 3000 from 1994. The software is COBOL  — it's old. Of course, there's no maintenance for it, we can't get parts for [the system] anymore," she said. "So we knew we had to migrate off."

I remember 1994 pretty well. In the year before we founded The 3000 NewsWire, HP was working on the Multiple Operating System Technology (MOST) that would've put MPE/iX and HP-UX on a single system. (Never released, but MOST was years ahead of the Superdome designs that eventually offered several server environments in one box. Just not MPE/iX.) RISC systems were the norm by that year, DDS-3 tape backups were rolling out, and 100 megabit LAN technology was just hitting the streets.

A peek at the 1994 technology of the 3000 shows some solutions that are rather elderly to be running in 2007. HP released MPE/iX 5.0 that year — five generations behind the current OS — and the brand-new 3000 systems of the day were the Series 9x8 servers. But unsupported? Not in the community we cover. Even today, HP will write 9x8 service contracts, and those servers will run the 7.5 MPE/iX release HP will still support (sans new patches) through 2010.

What seems to be unsupported is the idea that it's the 3000 getting too old to count upon at Brownsville. Every new vendor plays this card, coming in to convince a customer their system is historic instead of strategic. Something else is probably aging there, an element completely unmentioned in the Texas Technology report. My bet, sight unseen, would be the applications.

And parts for Series 9x8s? Just about all you want out there now, and almost at no cost. Disks, power supplies, boards — you can get it all from the independent market. I wonder why it comes as a revelation to smaller customers, however, that hardware a dozen years old may be harder to support, run slower than an application requires, and feels old in a presentation by a competing vendor. 

The crazy thing about COBOL on the 3000 is that HP is still offering its COBOL II compiler for sale. Has the vendor sold many of those licenses? Not with the likes of Acucorp's extend Version 8.0 out on the marketplace, or the Micro Focus COBOL solutions that have carried HP 3000 apps to migration targets like Windows, Linux and Unix systems. But unsupported alongside "still for sale," that doesn't match up.

As for considering COBOL old, that's a viewpoint popular with application companies which write products in something else. The truth is that COBOL still powers the largest share of applications around the world.

I'm sure there are some other, good reasons why Brownsville's city IT servers will have IBM badges on them sooner or later. (It might be later, because the article mentions delays in getting the nascent WiMAX technology up and reliable in the border city.) "Give us what's best for Brownsville, not what everybody else is doing," Bruciak is quoted as saying in the article.

Best included costs outside of city budgets. Brownsville had to borrow money to get into the IBM and WiMAX alternative, a $4.2 million deal for a city whose populace numbers under 200,000 today. The city is growing, but borrowing that IT migration money was no small matter, by the MIS director's account.

Float a loan to upgrade a 12-year-old server to a new platform and leave COBOL, add powerful wireless networking and hardware built in the current century? Sure. But don't be thinking that strategy would be any less appropriate for another environment — even one sold by IBM.

Java: Useful business tool that needs updating

Customers were chatting this week about Java in the business environment: whether this language has a place in creating applications and clients for enterprises. The consensus on the HP 3000 newsgroup is that the language once touted as "write once, run anywhere" has already earned its stripes across the world.

That's the biggest reason, perhaps, that Java is in sore need of updating on the HP 3000. In yet another project where HP's forthcoming open source white paper can help, Java needs to be rejuvenated from a 2000 version last updated by Mike Yawn, the 3000 division lab expert who was the Java go-to guy for years.

Yawn even made it a point to report on the Java One conference for several years. HP laid him off, more than once, until finally this superior technical resource landed at Quicken, expanding his reach beyond your venerated HP 3000 system.

Even though Yawn is probably out of reach now, Java improvements are another mission that an independent lab effort could tackle if interest and income could be tied to the technology. It's easy to see how this language that HP announced with great gusto for the 3000 in 1997 can make development easier a decade later. Mark Wonsil, a sharp developer with XML and Web savvy reported on Java's bounty

I have written Java programs for database access across multiple platforms. Type 4 JDCB drivers require no licensing on the machine that you’re on, so I was able to access SQL Server and Oracle at the same time - without using ODBC - very cool.

Using Java opens the door to many of the more recent technologies. Charles Finley of Transformix, a migration consultancy working in the HP 3000 community, says Java is pervasive.

The simple answer is yes, Java is widely used as a business language.  What makes the real question complicated is the number of different ways it is used and how it expands the definition of business language.  In order to really understand how pervasive it is you need to delve into such variations as J2EE, the various languages that run in the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) such as Jython and Groovy, Rich Client Architecture, etc. as well as the same kind of conventional applications that a language such as COBOL is used for.

Here is one resource that talks about the popularity of Java:

http://www.welton.it/articles/language_popularity.html