Database recovery delivered

All databases can become useless. That is, they suffer some kind of corruption or acquire an unwanted flag. The latter problem came to visit an HP 3000 site over the weekend. The solution to repair a 3000 database ultimately arrived from Adager, the resource the 3000 community calls when trouble needs fixing pronto. James Dunlap called out to the community, via the 3000 newsgroup:

I was increasing a dataset’s capacity using DBCPLUS and thought my (remote) session had hung after already doing PER COM, so I aborted the session.  The bad news was that we don’t have a current backup of the database, and now the “restructuring” flag is set and the DB is “bad.”

That's HP's DBChange Plus utility that Dunlap is using, a tool HP obsoleted. In this situation, DBCPlus played a part in making the database bad. Old tools might be better than no tools; HP tried to put its customers in touch with third parties in 2000 when it dropped DBCPlus.

Dunlap tried to make a copy of the database too, and the copy was also “bad”. He reached out to the community through the Web, although finally the solution came through a call to Adager.

Resetting the database flag advice came from Craig Lalley of EchoTech:

You can reset the "restructuring" flag. There are several ways to do it, none come to mind here in the airport, but I would start with DBUTIL. Do you have Adager, or [Bradmark's] DBGeneral? It is a two bit marker that you should be able to find with DEBUG.

But if you're not familiar with running DEBUG on an HP 3000, the tool can become a tar pit. You'll want expert advice to fix a database problem using DEBUG, a tool on every HP 3000. Custom programming might have solved the problem, according to Brian Donaldson. But he couldn't resist fundamental advice on database procedure: "I don't mean to sound unfeeling about your predicament, but you are getting everything you asked for -—"

1) Not having a backup copy of the DB prior to making structural changes
2) Not using Adager for structural changes to begin with
3) Doing these structural changes across a remote line is just asking for trouble!

You can write a quickie Privileged Mode program to FOPEN the Image root file, read label zero and reset offset zero to a value of "FW" (which means database okay and accessible.) Definition of the root file is in the blue Image/3000 Handbook.

Donaldson's fix carried three notable pieces of information. First, there's the use of a Priv Mode program, written to work in the deepest level of MPE/iX. A process not for many a 3000 owner. Then there's the Image/3000 Handbook, a community resource long out of print but on the shelf of savvy, seasoned 3000 experts.

Then there's that FW flag. The FW stands for Fred White, co-creator of Image. After leaving HP, White worked at Adager for many years before retiring. And so Dunlap found his answer at Adager:

Rene Woc at Adager walked me through the necessary steps to fix via Debug.  (FW did the trick.)  That was not only kind of him, but downright gracious, considering that we don’t have Adager (yet!). Thanks to all who helped.

HP 3000 help remains available through the Web. It is likely to be around long after HP closes its support doors for the system, delivered by way of third parties like Adager. "We remain surprisingly busy," Woc told me in a call last week. He monitored HP's Webcast last week online, staying up to date with HP's plans to curtail 3000 support.

Dunlap reported his repair process, a resolution via Adager expertise:

Database recovery delivered

All databases can become useless. That is, they suffer some kind of corruption or acquire an unwanted flag. The latter problem came to visit an HP 3000 site over the weekend. The solution to repair a 3000 database ultimately arrived from Adager, the resource the 3000 community calls when trouble needs fixing pronto. James Dunlap called out to the community, via the 3000 newsgroup:

I was increasing a dataset’s capacity using DBCPLUS and thought my (remote) session had hung after already doing PER COM, so I aborted the session.  The bad news was that we don’t have a current backup of the database, and now the “restructuring” flag is set and the DB is “bad.”

That's HP's DBChange Plus utility that Dunlap is using, a tool HP obsoleted. In this situation, DBCPlus played a part in making the database bad. Old tools might be better than no tools; HP tried to put its customers in touch with third parties in 2000 when it dropped DBCPlus.

Dunlap tried to make a copy of the database too, and the copy was also “bad”. He reached out to the community through the Web, although finally the solution came through a call to Adager.

Resetting the database flag advice came from Craig Lalley of EchoTech:

You can reset the "restructuring" flag. There are several ways to do it, none come to mind here in the airport, but I would start with DBUTIL. Do you have Adager, or [Bradmark's] DBGeneral? It is a two bit marker that you should be able to find with DEBUG.

But if you're not familiar with running DEBUG on an HP 3000, the tool can become a tar pit. You'll want expert advice to fix a database problem using DEBUG, a tool on every HP 3000. Custom programming might have solved the problem, according to Brian Donaldson. But he couldn't resist fundamental advice on database procedure: "I don't mean to sound unfeeling about your predicament, but you are getting everything you asked for -—"

1) Not having a backup copy of the DB prior to making structural changes
2) Not using Adager for structural changes to begin with
3) Doing these structural changes across a remote line is just asking for trouble!

You can write a quickie Privileged Mode program to FOPEN the Image root file, read label zero and reset offset zero to a value of "FW" (which means database okay and accessible.) Definition of the root file is in the blue Image/3000 Handbook.

Donaldson's fix carried three notable pieces of information. First, there's the use of a Priv Mode program, written to work in the deepest level of MPE/iX. A process not for many a 3000 owner. Then there's the Image/3000 Handbook, a community resource long out of print but on the shelf of savvy, seasoned 3000 experts.

Then there's that FW flag. The FW stands for Fred White, co-creator of Image. After leaving HP, White worked at Adager for many years before retiring. And so Dunlap found his answer at Adager:

Rene Woc at Adager walked me through the necessary steps to fix via Debug.  (FW did the trick.)  That was not only kind of him, but downright gracious, considering that we don’t have Adager (yet!). Thanks to all who helped.

HP 3000 help remains available through the Web. It is likely to be around long after HP closes its support doors for the system, delivered by way of third parties like Adager. "We remain surprisingly busy," Woc told me in a call last week. He monitored HP's Webcast last week online, staying up to date with HP's plans to curtail 3000 support.

Dunlap reported his repair process, a resolution via Adager expertise:

Nothing much new, said by new speakers

About two dozen HP partners and customers took less than a hour today to log into HP's latest update on the system which it calls the e3000. The event was aimed at partners in the Europe, Middle East and Africa HP region (EMEA), but was accessible worldwide. By the time 45 minutes had elapsed, HP had presented less than three dozen PowerPoint slides to the partners, nearly all of which contained zero news.

At least none to our eyes, since we had seen presentations by HP about the platform and migrations at the March GHRUG International Technology Conference. In fact, the e3000 partners got less information from the vendor than GHRUG attendees received, as HP skipped the "Who owns MPE/iX" section of its March presentation. (Download your own copy of the GHRUG slides, as presented by HP e3000 business manager Jennie Hou.)

But we heard a new speaker or two. An uncounted number of partners listened on dial-in phone links to Bernard Determe, whose presence on the HP e3000 EMEA Customers Webinar served as the only new voice. Determe is HP's World Wide Support Planning Manager, a name and voice the world's e3000 users can attach to the vendor's decisions about how long HP will remain in the 3000 community. We say decisions in the plural because, as Determe pointed out today, HP has made three 3000 decisions in all, one following another until "we lose our lab."

HP's speech was not without "color," as we journalists like to call "more speaking about a fact you have already been told." Determe noted that the vendor discovered twice that people are still relying on the 3000 — a point that has sparked two revisions of its support plans.

HP has changed its timeline, but never its intentions, he said. "Since early in the 2000s, we've been pretty consistent in the message we have delivered," Determe said. That is, HP intends to exit the 3000 community and curtail its support, the event the vendor insists on calling "end of life" for the HP 3000.

Life has gone on, he added. "In 2001 we announced the platform would be obsolete in five years, but we were still doing full support and limited development. History has taught us that migrating from any platform to another is a pretty significant endeavor," Determe said, "and many of our customers were still on the e3000 by the end of '06."

Despite HP's discovery of continued 3000 life in 2005, and then in 2007, the vendor seems serious about ending its support in 2008. Well, some kind of support, especially any which requires HP lab development to fix problems. That's what "Mature Product Support without Sustaining Engineering" means, he said.

"We still offer the same level of from the front line engineers, but we lose our labs," Determe said, "which means there won't be any more PowerPatches [in 2009] there won't be fixes for newly-discovered bugs. We won't be offering new MPE/iX versions so we will stop charging for update services."

As long as customers only wish to call HP for workarounds and fixes to existing problems, "nothing changes [through 2010]," he said. "The only thing that changes is that HP will be unable to provide you with fixes to newly-discovered problems."

Nobody should interpret the extensions as a change of HP strategy about the 3000's lifespan in the vendor's business. But "if some of you feel that what we will offer in '09 and '10 does not meet your needs, I strongly encourage you to get in touch with your HP contact, and we can see what type of custom solutions or transition plans we can build together, to help you migrate to another platform."

Liz Glogowski of the e3000 labs in HP presented the information about HP's Right to Use license (RTU). She called it "a new product that allows for upgrading to different levels [of HP 3000s]. As we've matured we've stopped selling the upgrade options, and yet people still needed to move, to do things like go from a 2-way to 4-way [CPU] on a system."

Glogowski reviewed a list of upcoming deliverables (one remaining PowerPatch 5 for MPE/iX 7.5, to be released "in the next few weeks" by Determe's calcuations) and deliverables for 2007. The accomplishments she listed "from the R&D lab" are

• Samba Porting white paper
• SCSI Pass-Thru Driver Enhancement
• Two critical data integrity patches
• MPE/iX7.0 PowerPatch 5
• Samba Release 3.0.22
• Securing FTP White Paper
• 2007 Daylight Savings Time Changes

Glogowski said that R&D lab engineers are working on peripherals, storage and networking white papers during the remaining 31 weeks of 2008 before the lab reaches its end of life.

HP to present 3000 report

HP 3000 community members might want to have their browsers tuned to the Hewlett-Packard Virtual Rooms Web site tomorrow. At 10 AM EDT (4 PM CET) the vendor will present a 90-minute Webcast on its view of the 3000's future and the past:

    * Review last year activities for MPE
    * Discuss latest announcements
    * Discuss migrations and transition tools and partners

You can dial in to the conference to hear HP's audio presentation. Call from the US at 866-832-0714, Germany at 069 2222 3190, the UK at 01452 555 574 and Canada at 866 530 4984. Other countries throughout the world have dialup numbers as well (listed at the end of this posting); the main number is the UK-based 44 1452 555 574. The conference code to supply at the prompt is 50 63 65#.

HP will present the PowerPoint slide deck for the Webcast at its Virtual Rooms site. The meeting key is EPAAPKCNJ9. Testing your browser and PC/Mac configuration beforehand is a good idea; links to do so are available at the site. HP's software won't use the Firefox browsers on either Windows or Mac PCs.

The Virtual Rooms technology from HP is also for rent by the hour, so the Webcast will offer one way to assess the potential for using this tool for your own company communication.

HP has an FAQ page on the HP Virtual Rooms, which are available for both meetings and training sessions:

Used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, HP Virtual Rooms provides a highly collaborative environment for small to large groups. Our products help you implement a cost effective, secure, and flexible solution for your current business needs while positioning you to take full advantage of future virtual training and virtual meeting functionality.

Our outstanding, reliable, and easy-to-use technology, deep knowledge of distance learning, ability to develop content, and worldwide, round-the-clock service allows customers to get important work done-in entirely new and better ways. We use this technology ourselves, throughout HP, giving us first-hand knowledge about our user needs.

At $180 per seat for a minimum 10-seat license, Virtual Rooms is not priced to compete with WebEx. But we've seen the technology used several years ago in an all-day OpenMPE meeting, hosted at HP's facilities back when Interex's HP World conference had gone belly-up. Even in 2005 it looked slick and complete for an audience of advanced technology users.

The full list of dial-in phone numbers for the conference:

Australia     1800 679 161
Austria     019 289 550
Belgium     024 003 450
Canada     1866 530 4984
China North     10800 712 1523
China South     10800 120 1523
Denmark 032 714 925
Finland     0800 117 112
France     01 70 70 07 60
Germany 069 2222 3190
Greece     00800 126 056
Hong Kong     800 963 831
Hungary 06800 15312
Ireland     01 4319 647
Israel     180 921 3988
Italy     023 600 3762
Malaysia     1800 805994
Netherlands     020 713 2968
Norway     800 18430
Poland     00800 121 0132
Portugal     211 201 811
Russia     8~10 800 2230 1012
Singapore     800 1205 507
South Africa     0800 990 918
Spain     914 146 117
Sweden     08 566 184 84
Switzerland     044 580 3457
Turkey     00800 1420 38506
UK     01452 555 574
USA     1866 832 0714

Escaping an HP 3000

We’re having trouble entering an escape character in MPE’s editor. Is there a trick to it?  We’re trying to change the instructions it sends to a printer.

Lars Appel replies:

I typically use some form of change or changeQ command when texting a file that contains escape characters and before saving it again.

:editor
/text myfile
/changeQ ‘27 to ‘126 in all
... edit file ...
/changeQ ‘126 to ‘27 in all
/keep
/exit

Using something like ~ (ASCII code 126) during the edit session. Of course, it only works if there is no ~ normally in the file.

Dave Powell adds:

Nowdays I keep permanent human-readable env files in a separate group, so conversions are one-way only and I never have to change esc back into ~.  When I got tired of changing ~ into esc I wrote a simple COBOL program to do it. It also knows how to filter out my comments, so I can make my human-readable env files even more readable.

Craig Lalley adds:

Turn on display functions first.

The Software Library opens for lending

An OpenMPE volunteer has presented the first full catalog for the legendary Contributed Software Library on his own server. Tracy Johnson reported that “The programs can accessed at 198.212.189.111. You may log in as USER.CSLXL and it will run the old CSL Catalog system.” The CSL has been in stealth mode since the Interex user group went bankrupt three summers ago.

The CSL catalog system is the easiest way to search out gems for 3000 adminstration such as ALLOWME from the Interex CSL library, or DBSAME, which makes extensive use of the DBINFO intrinsic to compare two databases.

You could get any of this, one program at a time from Charles Shimada, a volunteer whose hard work kept Interex computers running at many a conference. Shimada was holding the archives of the CSL when Interex melted down in 2005.

Now with the catalog back online, it's simpler to pull off your own utility after doing some shopping. Interex once made the CSL a benefit of site membership, but users who brought utilities to a conference got a Swap Tape with all contributions included. Most were placed on the next edition of the CSL tape.

Johnson says the 3000 community can use popular connectivity programs to grab programs. “After exiting the catalog, USER has access to the colon prompt, then can run Reflection or Minisoft file transfer if desired.”

More than two years have elapsed since Interex passed away. The user group's assets have been dissected, calculated and disbursed, but the CSL was not on any trustee's list. Interex never owned these programs, only the collective catalog of them on a single tape or selected from one data store.

To eliminate any problems of ownership, the Boeing contributed software, including the popular BOUNCER program, has been removed from the catalog.

To-do list for documentation

HP 3000 veterans preach on the merits of documentation. The practice is especially important for any enterprise system like yours, one which has information slipping away from the vendor every month, through retirements, revision of Web resources, and a declining support capability.

When a vendor support call to HP can be greeted with "what kind of printer is your 3000 anyway?" it's time to ensure you know as much about your server as you can. You might be teaching it to a support engineer. Only a System Manager's Notebook can keep a site going forward safely as a homesteader.

One of the most experienced 3000 experts on the planet, Paul Edwards, offers a free homesteading white paper on the Web which includes a contents list of his Manager's Notebook for 3000 sites. His Web-based paper is available for download, which is more than you can say for HP's availability of some of its 3000 peripheral documentation.

Edwards' advice includes a long list of what to document, as well as keeping up with the Gold Book, that logbook HP sent customers along with the HP 3000 hardware. Gold Book entries always were the customer's responsibility, a place to take notes on what a Customer Engineer did during a site service visit as well as record the site-specifics of a configuration. Russ Smith, a 3000 system manager for a California credit union, detailed the Gold Book's tabs as a list of what you should be documenting, as well as what went inside each section for him.

The tabs in the Gold Book binder and what we suggested be kept in each were:

    • Available Services
        - copy of HP user license (one of the many pieces of paper that was always floating around in the boxes when we unpacked and setup the 3000).
        - sheet containing name, telephone number and brief description of procedure for logging calls for hardware, OS, and each installed software program or utility (not covered by OS support).

•  Hardware Historical Records
        - hardware maintenance for the 3000’s cabinets, processor, processor board, mother board, power supplies, UPS, and modems.

    •  Software Historical Records
        - software maintenance for the operating system, patches, and third party software installations and upgrades.

    •  System IO Configuration
        - printouts of ODE/MAPPER run, SYSGEN/IO/LP, SYSGEN/IO/LD, DSTAT ALL and SHOWDEV after any change to the system configuration.
        - printout of SUMMARY CONFIG from NMMGR.

    •  Preventative Maintenace
        - schedule of PMs for the system and peripherals
        - instructions for maintenance of each piece of hardware on the system, as covered in the accompanying documentation when purchased.

    •  Computer
        - system inventory of hardware (using “System Equipment List” form), where the description and serial numbers are the items not found elsewhere.
        - copy of packing slips for all the hardware that was unpacked during installations.

    •  Terminals and Personal Computers
        - custom spreadsheets used to document terminal configuration and groupings.  This was specific to the Summit credit union software running for credit unions.  For each terminal/PC (virtual and serial), we tracked device numbers for where receipts and reports printed, DTC numbers, branch (location) names, user names, etc.

   •  Printers
        - hardware maintenance records of system line printers.

   •  Tape Drives
        - hardware maintenance records of system tape drives.

   •  Disk Drives
        - hardware maintenance records of system hard drives.

   •  Plotters
        - never used plotters, so we used this section to hold a printout of SYSGEN/MI and SYSGEN/LO setups.

   •  Installation Records
        - copies patchset loading instructions for the current release of the OS, and software loading and enabling instructions for the version currently in use.  This data was rotated out to another binder when appropriate.

•  Customer Support Service Agreement
        - copy of our hardware contract.

Document your homesteading

In a world where the wealth of digital information now outnumbers that on paper, printed documentation can still be important to homesteaders. Actually, all documentation is important for homesteaders. An experienced storage and networking guru made a comment about this on yesterday's HP 3000 newsgroup.

While I want to ensure I don't quote Denys Beauchemin out of context, he noted that securing documentation on older hardware — the sort you might use to replace devices like external tape drive libraries — can be "a fun issue."

Another fun issue for those who are considering homesteading; make sure you have all the documentation available for all your hardware.

Nobody here is talking genuine fun. A 3000 user was striking out while searching for documentation for his SureStore DLT Autoloader, apparently purchased used. I suggested that documentation is an issue, but it pales before some others — and plenty of issues also loom large for the migrating customer. I said, "Really, manuals as a reason to migrate?"

That was too much for Denys, and we had misunderstood one another. Manuals are important for a homesteader, no less so than the migrating customer. It's just that the documentation for older hardware can be harder to locate. That's an issue for any IT manager, experienced or otherwise, no matter what HP platform they're using. It's hard to imagine that every HP-UX system manager has all the manuals to all of the hardware in their shop.

The autoloader user got a 3000 community member to dig up the needed manual, online at a university in Ireland, since those docs have been pulled from HP's Web sites. HP has plenty of manuals online. So does the rest of the world — and sometimes more than HP can provide, online or otherwise.

You might find HP's manuals at docs.hp.com, as well as other places around the world. The autoloader is an eight-year-old device, so it's aging fast as a storage unit. But since HP has chosen to cut off its peripheral extension development for HP 3000s, you might have no other choice when you need to replace something like the C1745-8000. The customer was just swapping in another autoloader for a device that was working until recently.

Denys makes good points, but you can supply your own context and filter.

To me it sounds more like an excellent suggestion: “If you’re in for the long run, make sure you have all your documentation now.”

I do not believe that over time we will have more documents dealing with old pre-2000 hardware/software. I kind of think that whatever is available right now as documentation for that will probably diminish over time.

I looked at the HP Web site for DLT documentation for this device and it was not to be found there. This device is about 8-10 years old and HP no longer offers the documentation. It was found at a university in Ireland. That’s very reassuring, I’m sure it will be there next year and three years.

Just in case you were not reading closely, Denys was kidding on his last point, about finding the documentation at the Irish university in 2011. "Actually, this is one of the big issues with the Internet," he added, "a lot of older information disappears."

I might be confused here. But it looks like HP, which built this product and sold it to customers for the long haul, has let this information disappear. (There's ancient MPE/iX documentation online at HP, more than 12 years old.) Meanwhile the Irish university hung onto the information — and also made the docs available to the rest of the world. So who's taking care of the community better?

When an IT manger at the Phoenix Police Department can dredge up a manual off an Irish server better than HP, it says a lot about what to expect from HP as a homesteader. As Denys said, "A lot of older information disappears." The Phoenix Police tracked down the manual Monday morning; the user put a call out on Friday. I'm not sure HP even sells that level of 3000 response time, or if it does, you won't be able to buy it after December.

OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister, now at support provider Allegro, agreed with Denys. "Manuals are important!" she said.

I strongly recommend getting local electronic copies of the manuals you feel are important to what you do. And having a second electronic copy on another machine is a good idea, since one of the fundamental laws of computing is when you really, really need <that file> the server it’s on will be unaccessible.

Encompass, Euro Interex, ITUG Connect users

Four user groups became as one this week when the Encompass, Interex Europe, ITUG NonStop and Encompass Pacific joined hands as Connect. The new name is a result of the research required to acquire Web addresses and trademarks, according to president Nina Buik. But the user group alliance, now 50,000 strong, took its name as part of its primary mission.

"That's what we do," Buik said. "We connect members to each other, we connect members to HP and HP's partners, we connect members to education — so we thought it was a very appropriate name for the new organization." She invited members and the HP IT community to visit hpusercommunity.org to get "the feel of the new networking tools." The HP Technology Forum employed user networking tools in its 2007 conference.

It took 27 directors of the allied user groups to decide on things like names and committees, but only a dozen will be serving on the Connect board. Board representation includes members from each of the founding users groups. Buik, former president of Encompass, will lead the board as president. Margo Holen will serve as vice president, Glen Kuykendall was elected secretary/treasurer, and Scott Healy, former ITUG president, will serve as immediate past president. Newly elected directors include Steve Davidek — formerly of the Interex advocacy committee, and an HP 3000 site manager — Bill Johnson, Jay McLaughlin, Henk Pomper, Joe Ramos, Dr. Michael Rossbach, Gerhard Wedenig and Brad Harwell (HP).

Buik said that seating a vendor official on a user group board is not new to the ITUG members, but it's a novel appointment among most user groups' leadership. The HP user group Interex never had an HP employee on its board in 30 years, but had an HP liasion each year.

"We maintain numerous executive relationships," Buik said. "Brad Harwell is an HP executive and was named as the liaison to the new board. For clarity, David Parsons is a director." Parsons is an executive VP of Hewlett-Packard and ran point for the Technology Forum in its first year, when Interex had folded. Harwell is director of marketing in the Technical Solutions Group for the Americas at HP.

Advocacy efforts will be "stronger than ever" for the Connect group, which calls HP its strategic business partner. Encompass embraced the enterprise customer base as "an independent, pre-eminent worldwide community of users of HP enterprise technologies." The Connect advocacy to HP on behalf of the 3000 enterprise community might not be able to reverse HP's decision to drop MPE/iX certifications next month.

Buik has been on several conference calls to discuss the certifications, she said. "HP is aware of the expiring HP 3000 certifications, as I have been on several calls discussing this very issue.  As you know, certifications change as the technologies change. It's not always a popular decision."

Joining together to create a single user group has been HP's desire. "We congratulate the groups on this significant accomplishment," said HP's Harwell. "It will provide HP a direct, unified customer forum representing the greater HP user community interests worldwide.” Harwell said the combined groups will help customers worldwide "access an expanding portfolio of HP technologies."

However much ease HP has gained in working with a single group, the amassed customers will be working on raising the user voice to the vendor. "We look at multiple ways to get our voice 'Hurd,' " Buik said. "Please see my [Encompass] blog for more on this. There is an Adocacy Committee and the chair of this and all Connect committees will be volunteers! Board members will serve as liaisons for each committee."

Committee leaders were not decided when Connect made its alliance announcement yesterday.

Members of each user group will have complimentary membership in Connect through the end of 2008. The official launch celebration for Connect will take place at next month's HP Technology Forum & Expo, which kicks off June 16 for four days in Las Vegas.

A bleak Vista faces a mature OS sibling

Some veteran HP 3000 developers and consultants are taking note of how unloved Microsoft's Vista has become. The newest generation of Windows got an ugly reputation from its first month of release, kind of like that stain that lands on your dress shirt as soon as you step up to the buffet table. Windows is the leading choice for HP 3000 sites who are migrating, but apparently not many Windows users are choosing Vista on purpose.

What's more, Microsoft is in total denial of the OS warts and birth defects. Vista is so bad that PC users have begun to cheer for its older sibling, XP. You could have gotten good odds that an XP cheering section was a fantasy five years ago. Now XP fans are not only legion, but Dell will now scrape Vista off a new PC to get you to buy it. HP and Lenovo, Numbers One and Three in the Windows platform derby, also give customers a way to avoid Vista.

Microsoft has begun to treat XP like MPE/iX has been treated by HP. That's to say, XP had a deadline for its demise (dead from the vendor's point of view, but like MPE/iX, still living and working well outside the vendor's marketing chambers.) Microsoft extended the deadline. Still, the vendor is curtailing its XP support since it has delayed the Service Pack 3 for XP. These moves are all in the hopes of making Vista look like a better choice for companies. Individuals are forced to take Vista on a new system, but enterprises can push back.

Bruce Hobbs, a veteran of HP 3000 development and a consultant to 3000 software supplier ROC Software, keeps passing along notes from the outside world about the demise of Windows. The collapse of something that's installed on 90 million PCs could take awhile to ripple through the IT world. But the analysis shows that getting deeper into Windows than XP — and drinking the Vista Kool-AId — is a decision ripe with possibilities, many of them immature.

At the moment, the talk is about how much Vista will need to grow up to be as reliable as XP. By reliable I mean "able to perform without fail for a computer pro who is not a Windows guru." You can get Vista testimonials from the surgeons who've had their hands inside Windows' heart cavity for years. But the summary score for Vista is Not Ready Yet. That has not kept Microsoft from pushing it, even to the point of cooking the books on how many copies are being installed.

Dell, for one, "is installing Vista on your new machine, then cleaning it off and putting on XP, all in a little charade that lets Microsoft keep counting up the new Vista sales even among those who refuse to use it," according to San Jose Mercury News blog reporters on Good Morning Silicon Valley. HP and Lenovo will include an XP Pro recovery disk, on request, with qualifying systems.

Nothing starts out perfect, or even close to it in the computer business. MPE/iX had such a spectacular failure at first that 3000 users said that using a 1.x version of the OS was "a career-defining decision." (It was called MPE/XL in those days, but by any name it took two years-plus before the market began to trust it.) And the 3000 itself, powered by MPE, fell so flat on its face that HP yanked the system off the market at the end of 1972, before the smell of crashed programs could fill the minicomputer town square of the day.

The point to take away from the Vista false start is that staying with a mature solution can mean doing your own dance of denial. To keep using and getting support for XP, a company with designs on Windows must tune out the Vista snake dance. Windows is a logical choice for a company with PCs already using the OS on desktops — and a crack Windows staff or consultants on call — at least any company which must migrate. Migration to Vista, though, still looks like a leap too large to generate anything but a pratfall, unless an IT group has Windows gurus on payroll.

The Ars Technica Web site has a story on how Dell and Lenovo will be extending XP sales beyond the Microsoft deadline for the mature operating environment. Mature is a relative term there, of course, compared to the 34 straight years of MPE/iX field use, upgrades and development. Microsoft might promise a brighter future in its Vista, but the reality of today makes the new Windows a murky migration choice.

Linear advice saves tape storage solution

A 3000 community member who is obviously homesteading asked for help installing a Digital Linear Tape device today. His question to the HP 3000 newsgroup was "Why can't my Series 939 see the DLT8000 I just brought into the shop and mounted successfully?"

A couple of tape experts had good solutions to assist Joe Barnett, but both storage guru Denys Beauchemin and HP's Jim Hawkins couldn't resist much bigger advice: Migrate off that HP 3000. While Barnett contemplates that outsized project, he's got little to spark such an adventure — if his only problem is storing more data from a growing disk farm.

The experts shared a wide range of counsel, from the basic of "check that media" and "tape heads wear out on DLT8000s" to "they haven't made that generation of DLT drive in five years" (a period Beauchemin likes to call a lustrum, accurate but arcane English.)

When Hawkins stepped in to comment on Beauchemin's advice, the combination of counsel was another reason to believe in the power of the 3000 community.

Beauchemin, who's best known as Denys in the 3000 world, set off with an opinion, then followed with details. JIM of HP commented.

Denys: Unfortunately, this is the exact issue facing homesteaders and others who are delaying the migration off the HP3000, especially if they have pre-PCI machines.  The hardware to run it can only be found in antique stores and can be of varying level of readiness. You have many options open to you, but as time goes by they will more difficult to implement.

1- Look for another DLT8000 or a DLT7000, either one will work and you will not get any performance benefit from either one over the DDS-3, just more storage on one tape.

JIM >> Agreed.   Also make sure it has HP branded firmware; within the last two years had a painful set of System Aborts at a large customer due to semi-random walks through driver state machines initiated by non-certified firmware.

Denys: 2- Consider getting more DDS-3 drives.

JIM >> Agreed.  We have one medium size N-Class with something like 12 DAT24 drives -- they do either a 4x3 or 3x4 parallel storeset.   No messing with “reel” switches.

Denys: 3- Consider getting an HVD to SE/LVD SCSI converter and then trying a DDS-4 device.

JIM >> Don’t think that is an option since about 5.5/6.0  the “scsi_tape_dm” DDS driver will not “bind” to the F/W SCSI driver.   I think you may only configure the DLT (scsi_tape2_dm) driver “under” the NIO F/W SCSI HBA (fwscsi_dam).  As previously posted DAT40 with DAT24 media has worked well for some sites but DAT40 with DAT40 media is only supported on A/N-Class.

Denys: 4- Move to a PCI HP 3000 (the crippled A series or a small N-Class), then use newer LVD devices.

JIM >> Agree that PCI Systems will at least enable the usage of much newer “used” equipment and even some new stuff, if you want to buy a XP10k/12k ;-).

Denys: 5- Consider migrating from the HP 3000.  (This is the only long term solution and where I have been spending my time for the last several years. The newer server technology is light-years ahead of where the 3000 stopped and the new storage devices are incredible, fast and cheap.  The companies that we migrate are just amazed at the new hardware.)

JIM >> Agreed

Hardware, of course, is not the biggest challenge in migration. Moving programs, processes, training for new environments— that's where the work really begins. Besides, backing away from DLT is not all that uncommon in the 3000 community. At one point Denys told Joe about a needed interface, "HVD-SCSI is so last century." True enough. But storing to tape has its creaky looks, too. STORE To Disk is successful and better at carrying a 3000 into the next decade.

Matching HP's 3000 support bit for bit

Hewlett-Packard drags along its support business as the last car in the company's long train of HP 3000 products. 2010 might be the deadline for HP's 3000 hardware support, or it might not. In the meantime, third parties replicate more and more of what the vendor still sells to the community.

Companies hesitate to go third party on their 3000 support when they think of a system needing low-level service. 3000 hardware doesn't go bad often, but the most essential component, the CPU board, is supposed to need HP's intervention to get replaced.

But more third parties are doing this hardware recovery, the rescue of processor boards gone bad. HP's service reps do this for a fee, in due time. Software vendor IRS wrote a program that can service another support company's customer, if the customer needs an HPSUSAN identity number restored on a 3000. Adjusting SUSANs, part of a 3000's fingerprint, is a process that can invite illicit conversions. The key to staying legal is "like to like" replacements, according to support provider CTS's owner Brett Forsyth. At CTS, an HPSUSAN number is just another part of servicing a 3000.

Why not have HP do this work? Forsyth reports that the vendor's 3000 service to third party supported clients "on these issues is both slow and extremely expensive — plus very few of the HP CEs these days are experienced in these matters."

Addressing the identity of an HP 3000 at this bit level is supposed to be one of the things Hewlett-Packard has left to itself as a unique service. Not so unique, Forsyth says. HPSUSAN numbers won't hold up around-the-clock support while a third party waits for HP to adjust those bits.

The recent issues caused by HP’s lack of response to these issues have caused us to promote this service to all who need it, but as you can well imagine, some try to abuse the process. Like-to-like replacement is what we offer. Show me a Mapper or SYSINFO listing, or a photocopy/picture of the HP label containing the requisite information, or we do not have a deal. Our desire is not to defraud or infringe on anyone or anything, just to provide a service for those who wish to continue to use their HP 3000s until the system clock grinds to a halt.

As a support company, we cannot rely on HP to provide timely support to our clients, therefore we have always had to provide our own parts inventory and utilities to circumvent this.

Support from third parties has become a collaborative effort in 2008 according to Forsyth, who adds that he's been in the CE business for 27 years on HP 3000s.

We also provide e3000s and their peripherals for sale/lease/rental — both licensed or not. We really try hard to be the 3000 total support solution, and for what we don’t know, we know the people who do.  Better yet — they know us.

UDALink carries Data Express tool upward

Yesterday we took note of the new version of Data Express, a testing suite from COBOL supplier Micro Focus. The name of the product once described a software solution from HP 3000 Platinum Migration partner MB Foster, which also offers homesteading utilities for companies still relying on 3000s.

At MB Foster, Data Express became UDALink and an allied family of products years ago. MB Foster's Birket Foster clarifies the product name:

MB Foster makes Data Express available... well, it's not the original DataExpress that MB Foster bought from IMACS in 1989 —€“ the premiere data access and delivery solution for the HP 3000. That morphed to become UDALink (Universal Data Access Link) which now runs on the HP 3000, as well as Unix (HP-UX for Itanium included), Solaris and Linux. UDALink talks to various databases including Eloquence, Oracle, and DB2.

The UDA family of solutions includes cross-platform synchronization functions such as IMAGE and KSAM to Oracle or SQL Server. UDACentral does drag and drop data transfer to help migration data between OS platforms and different databases —€” IMAGE, Oracle, Eloquence, DB2 and SQL Server, among others).

The MB Foster products operate on all platforms including the HP 3000. The 3000 is a platform which Micro Focus does not support — which makes data access with the software written by Foster's company a starter step for a migration, a role the newer Data Express cannot play.

For example, UDA-Enterprise, a member of the UDA product stable, connects an enterprise's data from a range of server environments. Used at customers like Georgia Pacific, the software lets a company's applications use information across an enterprise.

MBF-Enterprise accesses,updates and joins enterprise information from applications and data sources as if they were relational  databases. Data is normalized and converted from hierarchical  structures into tables without redundant data. Clients can use JDBC, ODBC, ADO/OLE DB, or XML to submit SQL requests.

HP 3000 customers who've built their own apps use COBOL nearly all the time. That's why Micro Focus options for new compilers — as well as Fujitsu's NetCOBOL — will be important to migrating 3000 sites, or those which are connecting their 3000 apps to other enterprise servers while they homestead. COBOL is not a tool to be left behind, not without serious effort, anyway.

The MB Foster data sheet which describes MBF-Enterprise also notes the product translates application instructions, "such as those typical of legacy COBOL, to and from XML." Data connection products are as essential as gravity for IT enterprises. When a company can deploy one which understands MPE/iX applications, that kind of solution stays a step ahead in migrations by being able to understand an IT's foundation apps.

New tricks for HP's old dogs, and newer, too

Earlier today HP invited computer customers to a Webcast about NetBeans, technology that will never make it onto MPE/iX servers. The novelty of the Web information, hosted by Encompass, was its target: Users of OpenVMS, the last non-industry-standard operating environment which HP supports.

And an environment HP apparently still extends, given the information in the Webinar.

A plug-in for NetBeans, provided free-of-charge by HP, allows you to use NetBeans on your desktop to develop and debug OpenVMS applications remotely. This includes not only Java applications, but C, C++, Fortran, Cobol, Basic, and Pascal applications.

HP 3000 customers might recall that Java support was a big step forward for their server — back in 1998. Since that time HP has dropped all interest in the "write once, run anywhere" language. That's too bad for homesteaders, who could benefit from this free Integrated Development Environment which has only gotten richer and more proven in the past five years.

But NetBeans, and the power of Java in general, are a good story for a migrating HP 3000 customer, either as impetus to start moving or as a tool to make the migration easier.

There's almost no chance of NetBeans ever emerging on the HP 3000, largely because Java/iX is mired in a 2001 version of Java. Release 1.3 was the final resting place for a breakthrough language that even earned a Just In Time engine for MPE/iX. Mike Yawn demonstrated the Swing interface for Java/iX at one point. Now Yawn has moved beyond HP and into development at eBay. He gives a stark assessment of the challenge of catching up Java on the 3000.

Because [HP] didn't keep porting efforts going, eventually the Java version running on MPE (JDK 1.3) was no longer supported by Sun, which  meant that HP would have been left holding the bag if problems were found in the 'core' Java code (not MPE or PA-RISC specific). So I think they had no choice but to either drop support, or port a still-supported-by-Sun version. You can guess which option was chosen.

Even if an up-to-date Java version was available for MPE, NetBeans would be a tough nut to crack.  NetBeans (and its competitor Eclipse, which is my preferred IDE of the two) both require a lot of GUI support, as well as a robust threads implementation -- two things MPE never did well.  Early on we were trying to support the AWT and Swing GUIs on top of MPE's Motif implementation, but that never worked well enough that I'd count on it being able to handle something as demanding as NetBeans or Eclipse.  So anyone taking that on would be taking on Java + Motif + pthreads, at a minimum.

Developers on Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris, HP-UX — hey, even Mac OS X — can all take advantage of his new trick. Only HP-UX and Solaris qualify as old dogs among that list, which makes HP's OpenVMS support all the more interesting. Plug-in support to use NetBeans on a PC desktop might be considered something less than complete support. But HP's efforts for its VMS enterprise customers are still more than HP 3000 customers can hope for. You'll have to be on another environment to use this IDE, which you can check out at netbeans.org;

The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications, in Java, C/C++ and even Ruby. The IDE runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris; it is easy to install and use straight out of the box.

The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs.

While Yawn said that a Java update for the 3000 is a non-starter, he did hold out some hope that OpenMPE or the 3000 community could do as much as HP has done on the plug-in concept.

I suspect NetBeans offers remote debugging capabilities similar to Eclipse. [Allegro Consultants VP] Gavin Scott and I had some discussions early on about what the sweet spot for MPE might be  — to try to support a nice client-server approach where a developer could use the Eclipse workbench (I don't think we were looking at NetBeans at the time) to debug code running on MPE.   

I don't recall whether we had grander ideas for pushing code back and forth so that you could edit/compile on the PC and then push the class files up to the 3000 for execution, but it seems like that would probably be the next step. A lot of what I'm doing at eBay is Eclipse plug-in development, so I can see now where it would be possible to create an "MPE development plug-in" that could do a lot of this stuff transparently for the developer. So from a client side it could definitely be made to work.

Another problem that OpenMPE would have if they wanted to revive the Java/iX product would be what to do for a just-in-time compiler. That's a huge effort, and not something that I think we could have ever managed if we hadn't leveraged heavily off of the work done by the HP-UX Java lab.  I have no idea whether they are still investing anything in PA-RISC; it seems probably lose-lose, because

a) If HP-UX is still actively supporting PA-RISC, then they probably would be unwilling to share the PA-RISC code for their JIT / HotSpot technology.

b) If HP-UX is Itanium only, they might be willing to share their PA-RISC code, but with no sustaining engineering effort coming from them, OpenMPE would have to figure out how to move that forward with future Java revisions. I have no doubt that [former OpenMPE director] Mark Klein or Gavin could do it, but the list probably ends there.

Why there are always parts available

Hewlett-Packard tells the 3000 community that the vendor can provide custom legacy support through 2010, but the offering will depend on parts availability and the age of the HP 3000. Older systems might have parts which are no longer on the HP warehouse shelves.

But no matter how old the HP 3000 might be in your shop, you can be reasonably sure that spare parts will not keep you from keeping it working. Last week Wyell Grunwald offered a "practically free" HP 3000 on the Internet newsgroup. All that Grunwald wants is the cost of shipping to send the 200-pound server onto its new home.

After a quip about this early '90s server making a good bookend, another community member said they could use the system for parts. Imagine, an HP 3000 PA-RISC server built in 1990 — yes, 18 years ago — still has parts available in your community.

The key word in that last sentence is community. Even when HP runs out of HP 3000 parts, the community can carry on the supply. This group got a lot of longevity when it invested in the HP 3000, as well as durability. The word "tank" is part of Grunwald's 922 description.

It's difficult to overlook how underpowered the Series 922 might be compared to any other HP 3000. After all, the entire PA-RISC line only started to ship in 1987, and only in significant numbers a couple of years later. Code-named SilverFox Low at its introduction, this is a very early model 3000, just three systems off the start of the PA-RISC line.

The harsh numbers: This HP 3000 has just five percent of the horsepower of the smallest Series 979 or HP's smallest N-Class server.

But while you would not want to carry a lot of computing on this swaybacked steed, the fact that it's still a parts repository in 2008 might give a homesteader some comfort. HP warned everyone in 2001 that HP 3000 parts were going to become scarce in five years' time. So long as your community stays connected and communicating, the Hewlett-Packard MPE support expertise is likely to get scarce before many 3000 parts disappear altogether.

QSS gathers another 3000 HP expert

The man who made the Apache Web server a reality for HP 3000s has landed a post at an HP 3000 third party software firm. Mark Bixby joined Hewlett-Packard's MPE/iX lab late in the 1990s, while the vendor was still adding open source utilities to the operating system. Somehow, HP couldn't find a job this year for the man who brought domain name services and the first Web server to the HP 3000.

Bixby landed a development position at Quintessential School Systems (QSS), making him the second HP 3000 lab expert to join the K-12 applications provider during the past year. Jeff Vance, whose 28-year tenure with HP ended when he took early retirement from the company, joined the school system software firm in 2007.

To be accurate, QSS is more than just the spot where more than 100 US school systems buy an application for HP 3000s. Ever since 2003, QSS has been investigaing, developing, as well as recently shipping a vendor-neutral version of its software; that is, one that will not rely on a vendor-only operating environment like MPE/iX.

Vance joined QSS to work on the newest of platforms, open source Linux projects. Bixby seemed delighted to join his former HP colleague at the company which still serves many HP 3000 sites.

I will be taking a couple of months off to focus on various personal projects, then in July I will be joining Quintessential School Systems (QSS). I definitely look forward to working with Jeff Vance again, who also ended up at QSS after he left HP.

By the time Bixby ended his road inside HP, the company had already moved him out of HP 3000 day-to-day work. If ever there was a sign HP is taking rapid leave of your community, it's the vendor's inability to find a place for an engineer with Bixby's skills, as well as his repository of MPE/iX internals knowledge.

Bixby had done volunteer development for the 3000 community during 1998 on Apache, bringing over the Web server that's now a de-facto standard. Bixby ported the open source version of Apache to create the product that HP eventually called Apache/iX. The vendor took in both the 3000 Web server as well as its creator as part of HP's 3000 resources by the time Y2K was impending.

But HP has been cutting jobs continuously since CEO Mark Hurd arrived, a process which former CEO Carly Fiorina launched with the Compaq merger in 1999. Bixby located a new development lab to work at just weeks after he sent feelers into the 3000 development community.

A couple of months ago, HP in its infinite wisdom decided that my services were no longer necessary. My last day of employment there was April 18.

Please delete mark.bixby@hp.com from your address books, lest the other Mark Bixby who still works at HP (yes, there were two of us) starts getting e-mail intended for me.

So HP may still have a Mark Bixby, but the community knows the vendor doesn't employ the Mark Bixby. And since HP is dropping its 3000 operations, having the Mark Bixby outside of HP is a very good thing for your community, even if his work will revolve around a new platform solution. See, there's that MPE/iX repository, now working along with QSS founder Duane Percox's early support of OpenMPE.

Bixby has a helpful repository of his 3000 work at his own Web site, bixby.org

ERP and 3000 meet in Friday Web VRUG

The ERP user group CAMUS hosts a Virtual RUG meeting on Friday. A VRUG, as they are known, presents speakers on topics via a telephone hookup and Webinar using Web-Ex on your PC. Friday's VRUG meeting runs late morning to early afternoon Central time, but you can come and go from your phone and PC as schedule permits.

One talk that's worthwhile for HP 3000 customers of any kind, ERP or not, migrating or homesteading, is Jeff Kubler's "Moving in Your Own Time," presented over the lunch hour Central US time. Today I worked a bit to help him flesh out the idea and the specifics, but it's his show to present. His Kubler Consulting been a long-time consultant to the 3000 community, a trainer for Robelle's Suprtool and Speedware's products, and an advisor to the Amisys and Ecometry markets.

You can sign up for a spot by sending an e-mail to info@camus.org. Details of Webinar phone-in and WebEx login will be sent to registrants prior to the meeting. It's free and runs between 10:30 and 2 PM Friday.

The full agenda, as released by CAMUS:

Agenda (All times listed are Central Time)

10:30am - 11:00am - WebEx log-in setup

11:00am – 11:15am - CAMUS Update, Terry Floyd, President

11:15am – 11:30am - Infor Update, David Hotchner, Infor

11:30am – 12:15pm - Going Green - Compliance & Sustainability, Rod Ellsworth, Infor

Hazardous waste, recycling, renewable energy… how can manufacturers contribute to solutions instead of perpetuate problems?

12:15pm – 12:20pm - Break

12:20pm – 1:00pm - Moving in Your Own Time, Jeff Kubler, Kubler Consulting: Changing equipment, business systems? Control the process comfortably.

1:00pm – 2:00pm - Talk Soup - Networking-questions, tips, tricks, suggestions related to MANMAN, systems (HP, OpenVMS), business processes.

Hosted by Infor

Local attendees are cordially invited to the broadcast site:

Infor
500 W Madison, Chicago, IL
North Western Atrium Center (train station building)
Office contact 630.258.6056
Madison Room on the 21st floor

Minisoft's IMAGE/Eloquence tool: A Provider

Microsoft is a major player in most IT enterprises, and the company which brought us Vista is big enough to change the rules. It employs de-facto standards to "embrace and extend," and one change for Microsoft Windows Server database access has spawned a new IMAGE and Eloquence tool. Perennial HP 3000 software provider Minisoft serves up this tool for Windows Servers this month.

Minisoft explains why the new OLE DB Provider can bridge the path between HP 3000 data and other servers in the Windows line in the years to come. Windows, after all, is the leading choice of 3000 migration sites by number, if not by size of IT budget.

The new Minisoft OLE DB Provider opens the door to a rich set of  development tools and platforms for Microsoft Windows Servers. Microsoft recently announced that OLE DB will be the method by which all information is accessed. The Microsoft OLE DB to ODBC Bridge known as MSDASQL is not available for the 64-bit environment.

The roadmap for future Microsoft applications requires using OLE DB data sources to  “provide uniform access to data stored in diverse information sources." The Minisoft OLE DB Provider provides that access to your existing IMAGE and Eloquence databases.

This is the first that we've heard of a data bridge that's been branded under the Provider name, but hey, Microsoft's OLE announcement is pretty recent by Minisoft's accounting. Minisoft goes on to explain where its Provider will help in IMAGE and Eloquence access. Migrating or homesteading, you still have to access data.

Use the Minisoft OLE DB Provider for IMAGE/Eloquence to resolve the following issues:

Transparent access to your Image/Eloquence data from the 32-bit or 64-bit editions of SQL Server 2005.

Integrate IMAGE or Eloquence database access smoothly into your .NET application development environment.

Continue accessing Image or Eloquence data with Microsoft Visual Studio, Borland development tools, Microsoft Access (through VBA), ActiveX Scripts, Crystal Reports, Windows Scripting, IIS web applications (ASP and ASP.NET) by using the Minisoft OLE DB Provider.

Minisoft offers evaluation copies of its software at the Downloads page of its Web site.

Six years, five months, and forecasts for futures

This week the 3000 community will move into the month that signals six-and-a-half years of the 3000's Transition Era. It has been a period filled with dread, hope, opportunity and change. A good deal of all that was predicted from the very first day of Transition, but some events were not. 3000 owners who need to forecast events for the next 77 months, now that the first 77 have passed, can start by reviewing what's come to pass from predictions and what has not, and why.

On November 14, 2001, the day of HP's announcement of ending its 3000 operations, ERP and MANMAN advisor Cortlandt Wilson looked into his crystal ball and saw these events:

Up until Jan 1, 2007 service parts should be available from HP just as they are now. After that I expect that HP will continue it’s policy of selling service parts on a “best, available” basis.

Not only accurate, but accurate-plus: HP still offers parts and service on its support throughout this year, two more than HP figured. Also as predicted, the third party market and the vast field of identical HP 9000 hardware has made parts a non-issue to go forward with a 3000.

Q: Is it possible that someone will take over support of MPE/iX after HP stops support in 2006?
A. Yes. In fact the conversations are already well underway.  I was in on a phone call between HP and members of Interex’s MPE Forum just yesterday where that topic was discussed at some length.

We wish we could say this one was forecast accurately, but that swap-over front has moved slower than forecast. HP's decision on support for MPE/iX, tied to licensing source for some, outlasted Interex and that MPE Forum. The timing still seems to be tied to end of HP support. It's important to remember that HP made its discontinuance announcement from two spokesmen: Then-GM Winston Prather, and Jim Murphy, the latter notably of HP Support.

But HP did follow through on what it did promise for improving system, as predicted.

Wilson took a look forward on the dark November day for the 3000 and saw more HP work in the future.

It looks to me like HP is planning to go ahead and roll out the hardware and software improvements that they already had in the R&D pipeline. Furthermore, MPE/iX ombudsman Jeff Vance indicated to the Interex volunteers yesterday that "if anything, the next SIB (System Improvement Ballot) will be more important than last year.

Also predicted well, since HP has more than three-score beta test patches created after 2001, all waiting for general release.

Systems have flowed through the marketplace, more than four years after HP stopped selling the 3000.

I expect the already flourishing used systems market to continue to be there for many years. I
would add a caveat here. I would expect the used systems to be available after 2003, but perhaps not at the current prices.

Those prices are better than ever, and supply meets demand even for the latest class of 3000.

Most important to today's forecasters, Wilson's prediction of the 3000's utility have come true and continue well beyond the date everyone worked toward more than six years ago.

I don’t believe that saying that the HP e3000 is “dead” is an accurate description of the situation.  For some users today’s announcement may be one more reason to leave the HP e3000.  But many of you have looked at the options and have decided to stick with MANMAN and the HP e3000.  If that decision made sound business sense yesterday, I suggest that it probably still does today. And it may still make sense come January 1, 2007.

Or on April 14, 2008, too. Each company can migrate in its own time.

Deleting bad system disks

As HP 3000s age their disks go bad, the fate of any component with moving parts. Even after replacing a faulty drive — which is not expensive at today's prices — there are a few software steps to perform. Wyell Grunwald explains of the failed system (bootup) disk

Our disk was a MEMBER in MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET. I am trying to delete the disk off the system.  Upon startup of the machine is says that LDEV 4 is not available.  When going into SYSGEN, then IO, then DDEV 4 it gives me a warning that it is part of the system volume set — cannot be deleted.  I have done an INSTALL from tape (because some of the system files were on that device), which worked successfully. How do I get rid of this disk?

Gilles Schipper of support provider GSA said that INSTALL is something to watch while resetting 3000 system disks.

Sounds like the install did not leave you with only a single MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET disk.

Could it be that you have more than one system volume after INSTALL because other, non-LDEV 1 volumes were added with the AVOL command of SYSGEN - instead of the more traditional way of adding system volumes via th VOLUTIL utility?

You can check as follows:

SYSGEN
IO
LVOL

If the resulting output shows more than one volume, that's the answer.

He offers a repair solution as well.

The solution would be as follows:

1. reboot with:

START NORECOVERY SINGLE-DISC SINGLE-USER

2. with SYSGEN, perform a DVOL for all non-ldev1 volumes

3. HOLD, then KEEP CONFIG.SYS

4. create new SLT.

5. perform INSTALL from newly-created SLT.

6. add any non-ldev1 system volumes with VOLUTIL. This will avoid such problems in future.

If you do see only 1 system volume with the LVOL command, the only thing I can think of is that VOLUTIL was used to add ldev 4 to the MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET after the install.

Tape backup: Set DLT to beat DDS

Backing up enterprise-grade 3000s presents more interesting choices today than 5-10 years ago. Back then DDS had only two generations, neither of which were reliable for certain. A DDS tape used to be the common coin for OS updates and software upgrades. The media has advanced to a DDS-5 generation, but Digital Linear Tape (DLT) has a higher capacity and more reliability than DDS.

When a DDS tape backup runs slower than a DLT, however, something is amiss. DLT is supposed to supply a native transfer rate of 15 MBps in the SureStore line of tape libraries. You can look over at an HP PDF datasheet on the SureStore, even certified by HP for MPE/iX, at this link.

HP 3000 community partners such as Genisys and Bay Pointe and Pivital Solutions offer these DLTs, and Orbit Software has an "order with our backup software" option, too. But at an estimated cost of about $1,300 or more per DLT device, you'll expect them to beat the DDS-4 transfers of 5 MBps.

HP 3000 customer Ray Shahan didn't see the speed he expected after moving to DLT and asked the 3000 newsgroup community what might be wrong. Advice ranged from TurboStore commands, to channels where the drives are installed, to the 3000's bandwidth and CPU power to deliver data to the DLT. HP's MPE/iX IO expert Jim Hawkins weighed in among the answers, while users and third-party support providers gave advice on how to get the speed you pay extra for in DLT.

Dave Gale wrote in an answer that device configuration and CPU are potential problems:

If you are using a DLT it likes to get data in a timely manner. Otherwise it will do the old 'shoe shine'. This means that other devices on the line can affect the bandwidth on the channel and starve the DLT. If you are using something like RoadRunner, then the CPU can be a real factor in this equation (especially single-CPU machines). So, you may not only want to check the statistics portion of the report, but monitor your machine during backup with Glance or SOS.

Gilles Schipper of support company GSA said that a TurboStore command is essential. "If HP TurboStore, are you using MAXTAPEBUF option on STORE command?"

HP's Hawkins said channel configurations of backup devices are key to ensuring that DLT tops the DDS speed:

Generally this shouldn’t happen. It might happen if the DLT and disc are on the same channel while the DAT/DDS was on a separate one. Might also happen with large numbers of small files on semi-busy system as some DAT are better at start/stop than DLT. If you are running STORE the STATISTICS option can give a broad indication of throughput for A/B comparison.

EchoTech's Craig Lalley, who's made a business out of upgrading HP 3000 storage devices, said that even when a DLT is moved to a different channel than the disk drive, you can do more. "The easiest thing to do is run the backup in the C-queue. Also, try turning software compression off."

Allegro Consultants' Stan Sieler offered a basic remedy. "I'd try a new DLT tape. I've found that helps at times."

3000 user Jack Connor testified to how much faster a DLT backup becomes with the best software parameters for backup commands. "MAXTAPEBUF and INTER can make a major difference," he said. "I recently had a backup to DLT cut from 7 hours to under 2 by just adding these parms."

We recently ran an article about ScreenJet's advice about large backups which skip the tapes altogether. STORE-to-disk (STD) counts on the reliability of a second disk mechanism, but DLT tapes have moving parts and magnetic properties, too. They just seem to cost a good deal more than disks which hold 40 times more than a DLT tape.

Spreading 3000 expertise on tail slices

As the HP 3000 community huddles together in numbers, the skills and solutions they need become more unique. Migration proponents might call HP 3000 homestead services arcane or obtuse knowledge, but 3000 community members still need to be served from what's known as The Long Tail.

The great thing about Long Tail economics is that small companies can have a big impact on a customer's success using the strategy. The Long Tail, according to Wikipedia, is

The niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.

Doing just a little volume of hard-to-find items like HP 3000 management and data services looks like the new strategy from an old 3000 partner, The Support Group. The company has made its bones on being among the top Trusted Advisors for ERP strategy and MANMAN support. But TSG's recent posting to a the 3000 community Internet newsgroups sketched out solutions which might have become hard-to-find.

While Netflix and Amazon, being public-traded companies, are a long way from small providers, they do offer things you can't get in many places. So do many 3000 community providers. And so community members saw the list of services and solutions TSG (which likes to call itself tSGi, for the the Support Group, inc.) is putting out there; a subset of tSGi's list are slices of the long tail:

HP 3000/MPE Support – tSGi can provide management of your HP 3000 remotely or hosted at our datacenter in Austin, TX

Combined MANMAN and HP 3000 MPE – Complete end to end proactive management of MANMAN and HP 3000 processes and jobs

HP 3000 Disaster Recovery – tSGi provides emergency backup HP 3000 hardware in our Austin datacenter

ERP Applications – tSGi works with a number of ERP vendors to bring the right solutions to our MANMAN customers

Data Cleansing – Whether you are staying on MANMAN or migrating to a new ERP application, clean data is vital to running a successful business

Data Migration – tSGi has done data migrations for numerous MANMAN sites to many different ERP applications.  Our data migration knowledge greatly reduces the migration timeline and data errors that can occur without our deep knowledge of MANMAN and IMAGE data relationships

Archive and History Support - for companies that have migrated off of the HP3000 but need to keep the HP 3000 data available, tSGi will keep your HP 3000 in our datacenter at the ready for user access or authorized outside entities, such as auditors

The size of the 3000 community makes a lot of its needs, both migration- and homestead-related, Long Tail servings. That's why a company need not be large to deliver great benefits to a 3000 owner.

Checking out the Contributed Software Library

When the HP 3000 first nurtured its community, the computer pros contributed software for one another. This sharing first took place in the 1970s, an era long before open source when only academics exchanged work without payment. For more than two decades the 3000 community created the Contributed Software Library, programs written and fostered in the computers of user group Interex.

More than two years have passed since Interex passed away. The user group's assets have been dissected, calculated and disbursed, but the CSL was not on any trustee's list. Interex never owned these programs, only the collective mass of them on a single tape or selected from one data store.

Now the community is looking for what it contributed. Charles Shimada, a volunteer whose hard work kept Interex computers running at many a conference, was holding the archives of the CSL when Interex melted down. He's willing to share any particular CSL program, so long as a 3000 user can ask for it by name.

Except for a few programs created and contributed by HP 3000 engineers at Boeing, the whole of the CSL is now available. How to get a program is a process with several solutions. Shimada said if anyone wants a contribution from the CSL, he will try to supply it in a store to disc format.

Craig Lalley, a former member of the Interex CSL committee, wonders that if Interex is now a non-entity — and indeed, the CSL looks abandoned — then who could sue for damages if the software programs were released

OpenMPE is ready to host this collection of contributed programs, accessible from a Web server. A collection of this kind of contributed software is already available on the servers at 3k Associates.

Inventing a new home for Invent3k

Inside of HP's 3000 labs — a place that amounts to cubicles, a meeting space with a speakerphone and a portion of a computer room — sits a community resource. HP has a public access server called Invent3k, a 3000 which anyone can use. The server was set up in 2001 to encourage community development of software for the 3000. HP stocked this system — a Series 989 at the time — with HP subsystem development software such as a COBOL compiler and more.

IBM appeared to follow the HP move a few weeks after Invent3K went online, opening up a public server for Linux developers and users to access over the Internet. History would show that Invent3k went online less than six months before HP announced the vendor would leave the 3000 market. Leave sometime later in the future, as it turns out.

Now the future is Invent3k is, well, up for grabs. HP has told the community members that it will pass along the server's data — and we don't know if that includes these subsystem software — at the end of HP's 3000 operations. Bill Cadier, who's still working inside the 3000 labs, looks to be the current manager of Invent3k. But like HP's definition of when its 3000 works cease, the move date for Invent3k is unannounced, too.

This HP 3000 is a resource which OpenMPE would like to host right away, or as soon as possible. The idea of an independent, virtually non-profit advocacy group which stewards such a server seems like a good plan. Nobody, not even HP, wants to see Invent3k go offline for good. It's the home of code like txt2pdf, which as its name suggests, takes a text stream on the HP 3000 and converts it to a PDF file.

Invent3k is now a Series 979-400 HP 3000, according to one of its users, OpenMPE director Matt Perdue. To say that Perdue has fire to spark HP's changes to its 3000 business would be an understatement. In a letter published elsewhere, he's just advised the R&D Lab manager to let loose of the MPE/iX source and step out of the way.

Regardless of whether Ross McDonald takes heed of Perdue's directive, the OpenMPE director is keeping close track of what HP is doing, or not doing, for the community. That includes the state of Invent3k, which has gone offline unexpectedly from time to time.

With the outages and unspecified future of Invent3k, Perdue urged 3000 programmers who've used the server to make their own backups of their code and projects on the 979's drives.

Another engineer who counts HP service in his resume, Lars Appel, also believes OpenMPE is the best place for Invent3k. After all, Hewlett-Packard is dropping its sustained engineering — patch building and fixes to MPE/iX — in 40 weeks.

Invent3k's service can be more easily duplicated now than 10 years ago, when HP was breaking ground with a public server. This concept was crucial to MPE/iX joining the technology of the Internet and open source. Mark Klein, the former head of Orbit Software's labs and a former OpenMPE director, bootstrapped the whole Samba-Apache-BIND-Internet offerings with his GNU C++ compiler project — hosted on Invent3k.

Demise depends on point of view

AICS Research has rolled out an evolutionary version of the company's QueryCalc HP 3000 product. Founder Wirt Atmar announced the new product, QCReports, in a posting over the HP 3000 newsgroup. You can download and install a version 0.98 copy from the product's Web page, aics-research.com/qcreports

QCReports runs on any system which supports Marxmeier Software's Eloquence database: HP-UX, Windows or Linux. The software has been 95 percent rebuilt on Windows from the QueryCalc code, Atmar said. In an extensive post to the newsgroup he explained the evolution of the product and how it can help an HP 3000 site migrate to another platform

Although there are an enormous number of PC  manufacturers, there’s really only one system, and I very much believe in Bill Gates' plans for World Domination. Because of that belief, the newest version of  QueryCalc, which we now call QCReports, was translated onto the PC.

However, in that post you'll see another viewpoint from Wirt, who has logged many hours as an advocate for the HP 3000 and IMAGE. The HP 3000 died in 2001, he says, and so QCReports had to take up QueryCalc's mantle for AICS. But Wirt showed curiousity about any interest in a 3000 version of the product, too, a broad-minded view in the wake of an obituary.

The question: Is there any interest (meaning money) in us putting together host code for the HP 3000 and  IMAGE? I estimate that it would only take us a couple of months (in the  Atmarian Calendar) to get it up and running on the HP 3000. We already have all of the database query code written for the HP 3000. It’s only a matter of rewriting it for the new communications protocols.

The death of a system is a serious matter for anyone who's invested so much in it across so many years. But I disagree with the time of death, or even the current prognosis for how long the 3000 can survive.

To make my point about the premature 3000 obituary, I go back to Wirt's point in a subsequent message, when he responded to the mess we see in the Windows world, post-XP.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of this business is the tendency of people to exaggerate, to try to protect whatever nook and cranny they’re comfortable in, rather than look at the situation as the way things are.

“The way things are” is not an empirical, unassailable point of view for the 3000 community. As Alfredo Rego said in his keynote at the recent GHRUG conference, there are many perspectives for the HP 3000 users to use in viewing their world. Wirt builds software from the viewpoint that the 3000 is long dead. IT pros who advise on 3000s like Michael Anderson of J3K Solutions see a Windows world that grows more deadly and blinding with each release. Calling Windows a way for Microsoft to suck more life-blood, he says of Microsoft's product strategy

With every new release of the Bill Gates platform, (from Win 3.x, (95/98/me), 2000, XP, and now Vista) end users and developers experience something similar to a blind man having his furniture rearranged.

Meanwhile, Shawn Gordon and Craig Lalley used their messages to the group to assay alternative solutions and compare the 3000’s successful designs with younger products on the Windows platform.

Is the 3000 dead? Is Windows a life-blood-sucking platform? Does all of this Windows enterprise design remind you of something you bought for your HP 3000 10 years ago? If your answers are yes, no, and yes, you find yourself looking through a migrated perspective. If the answers are yes, yes and yes, you might be in the middle of a Windows migration. And if the answers are no, yes, and no, you see homesteading as the way to view the future. Lots of nooks for lots of reasons.

The nook and cranny I am comfortable in is obvious: historic, legacy in the sense of legendary, and realistic about the ultimate demise of everything we hold dear. Prepare for death and the life that follows. You will know when death arrives, so don’t worry on that score. I just believe it’s still too early to write that obituary for the HP 3000, even while creating alternative solutions for the problems which that great platform continues to solve.

But boy, if anyone can move a product from MPE/iX to Windows better than AICS, I’d sure like to see them try. Especially in keeping the 3000 hosting capabilities inside the evolved product, like QCReports does.

On the other hand, QCReports does have potential for the 3000 user who's not migrating, either at this time or at any time. Wirt summed up his original posting,

On one hand you might ask why spend any money on a dead platform, and that’s certainly a reasonable question. But on the other, if you’re intending on staying with MPE for a little while longer, QCReports would be a way to significantly upgrade and modernize your capabilities with the HP 3000. And, if and when you do migrate, if you move to a platform which Eloquence supports, your total migration time for your database and reports will honestly be only a one or two hours. Other than changing the IP address of the new host, you’ll never notice a single difference.

The many views of your community

Adager's Alfredo Rego covered a broad swath of subjects at the recent GHRUG International Technology Conference. His keynote talk ranged from "parables" of Ford executives who had no user experience with the cars they designed and marketed, to the Bank of America founder — whose said his lending requirements began with "people whose character I trust."

Each story seemed to have some connection to the life of a 3000 user in the Transition Era, and one section of Rego's talk addressed the many ways to view HP's 3000 profile these days, as well as views of the community.

"It is something which can be viewed from many different angles," he said. "There is HP's high perspective. The lowly user perspective. The vendor perspective." Each segment went onto the chalkboard behind him in a room where students received instruction. At that moment, Rego could be viewed in a teacher's perspective.

"HP wants to send one message that won't confuse," he said. "There are also many perspectives of users, such as those who couldn't wait for HP to get out of the market in 2001, to provide a reason for them to move away from the 3000, using hired guns."

Rego drew a link back to his Bank of America parable, in which the founder knew his customer community from a "rubber meets the road" perspective. With the sub-prime debacle caused by outside management as a modern day allegory, Rego reminded the GHRUG  attendees about the security of using a close-up perspective.

"Whenever you get hired guns, managing things they have no clue about, all hell breaks loose," he said. Not that HP has nothing but hired guns managing its relations with this community, of course. "I have had the pleasure of working with very technical people at the lowest possible bits and bytes level HP since 1974," he said.

The pleasure seemed to fade further up HP's management line. "I was frightened when I spoke to HP's managers some time ago and asked them, 'Have you run an HP 3000 application?' I said oh boy, this is the beginning of the end. That is something to keep in mind, because it is pretty predictable."

Talk to another machine to assure a future

We'll file this one under both Homesteading and Migration, because this advice from the GHRUG International Technology Conference can serve both those staying and those leaving the 3000 community. Make sure your HP 3000 talks to another server well — today. It can mean the difference between using newer technologies down the line for the 3000 as you transfer data, either for backup or transitions to new systems.

For the homesteader, long term use of the 3000 might be blocked by a change in something like Cisco networking protocols. This is a de-facto kind of standards shift, according to ScreenJet's Alan Yeo. And it's just the kind of change that HP, or any third party support provider, will find it impossible to difficult to address (depending on whether it's HP or the third party you use.)

"When people talk about long-term homesteading, and what's going to happen to the 3000, this is the one point," Yeo said. "If you've got a 3000 and it's isolated from the outside world, you've probably got a lot less problems. But if you're using a 3000 in an environment that's pretty related to other machines or other sites — well, if HP are no longer doing patches, next year when Cisco might change what they're doing with their FTP process, or somebody else changes something and it becomes a de-facto standard, the odds are you won't get the link between the 3000 and another device working."

One solution lies in another platform, according to Marxmeier's AG's Michael Marxmeier, who was also at the GHRUG talk.

"You should plan ahead to be able to communicate with servers in the rest of the world," said Marxmeier, especially for any company with governmental computing partnerships or requirements.

Yeo said his company was using an intermediate server as a workaround while setting up an FTP exchange of HP 3000 backup files with a Network Attached Storage device. An intermediate server can cause a tremendous increase in network traffic from a 3000 to another device, he added, so solving the direct link challenge is the most efficient solution.

And the migration connection on this advice? It's sensible to plan for a target migration server to act as the intermediary between an HP 3000 and another device. Makers of network devices such as routers and switches will continue to be able to communicate with Unix servers, for example, or even Windows XP systems.

More storage tips from Houston

ScreenJet's Alan Yeo had advice for 3000 storage solutions at this month's GHRUG International Technology Conference, counsel for those with limited budgets or no budget at all. Disk drive prices have fallen so far that a half-terabyte $600 RAID-class drive can be had for HP 3000 use, he said.

Even an HP-branded drive for the HP 3000 costs under $500 by now, although it will offer less than a tenth of that capacity. A 36GB HP drive is priced at about $400 on the community's market, "so long as you don't want it tomorrow. Getting enough disk space to do a STORE to Disk should not be a problem," he said.

Backup techniques can have an impact on costs to upgrade storage options, too. "You can always look at splitting your backup up, if you don't have enough disk space. Instead of doing @.@.@ you split it into chunks, if you don't even want to spend $400 for more disk."

3000 managers can get around the problem of backing up files of 4GB or more with some backup products "which let you specify extent size you want to use, so they won't go up to 4GB," Yeo said. "The other approach we've adopted with HP STORE is to actually split up the backup, so the backup runs in three or four steps, each one of them not exceeding the 4GB limit."

Breaking a backup into chunks also means "it's an awful lot quicker to get something back," Yeo added.

Making NAS work with the 3000

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a powerful enterprise resource, full of value now that disk prices have plummeted. At the GHRUG International Technology Conference, Alan Yeo of ScreenJet shared his secrets for making NAS an HP 3000 tool.

"Like most HP 3000 shops we were looking for a cheap way to [store many gigabytes of data] — and there was no way we could afford a DLT," he said. Digital Linear Tape boasts massive capacities, but most storage these days is going straight to another disk.

Yeo said that fundamentally, the method to include NAS as an option is to create STORE to Disk files, "and then FTP those STORE files up to the NAS device. A simple half-terabyte (500 GB) RAID-1 NAS device is the equivalent of 40 12-GB DDS tape drives."

It's a little unsettling to learn how much HP 3000 backups still go onto DDS tapes. Even the DLT tapes are a pain to handle, Yeo added.

You need enough free disk space on your HP 3000 to do the STORE to Disk files, Yeo explained. "If you haven't got 50 percent free disk space and you're doing a complete backup in one hit, you're going to have a problem," he said.

STORE to Disk speeds are not significantly slower than STORE to tapes. One way to speed up the process is to have a few separate volume sets for these STOREs, sets that are two or more high-speed spindles. HP's got disks today which spin up to 15,000 RPM. Third party disks work with HP 3000s, too, in case HP hasn't got a certified product for your MPE/iX server.

FTP bandwidth can be a bottleneck for some older HP 3000s, sometimes as slow as 10 megabits per second. "You may have a protracted FTP process to your NAS device," Yeo said.

Using NAS is not a substitute for having a good SLT tape for your system in case of disaster. Yeo added that doing an @.@.SYS backup onto the same SLT tape, "so you'll have everything you need when you bring the box back up to get the networking started."

Devices available for HP 3000 NAS use? The Buffalo Terastation Pro worked in one of Yeo's projects for a client, and the device starts at $650 and goes up for 1-4 TB. Another choice is the Infrant ReadyNAS at the same price point. Shop online.

It may seem crazy to be ordering HP 3000 storage devices from Amazon.com. But so much has changed for the HP 3000 customer, and some of the change opens up new opportunities to save money and make your server even more efficient.

What HP has to say for itself

In a little more than 40 minutes last week, HP's talked about the 3000 division's future for the remaining work on the system. We reported the math for HP e3000 business manager Jennie Hou at her talk. Less than 41 weeks remain before HP's 3000 development of any kind will end. That's scant time to finish so many tasks, like release of 3000 enhancements long-finished but untested, or HP preparation for turning over the care of MPE/iX to the community.

HP is going to release a PowerPatch 5 to its support customers during 2008. The company will also "provide clear guidelines for performing hardware upgrades." These were the only plans HP announced for the rest of this year. There will be no further PowerPatches for 6.5 and 7.0 MPE/iX releases. (The individual 6.5/7.0 patches can be downloaded by the entire community.) That's all HP plans to do.

Click on the slide at the right to see the sparse plans for the remainer of 2008.

Those unreleased beta-test patches are in limbo, unless HP has confidential plans it didn't share at GHRUG. A pledge to deploy "a very aggressive plan to put together a program for beta test patches" was entirely without details. HP still puts the plan in the hands of customers, a community loath to change much on frozen systems.

Customers and partners in the audience asked if HP would reduce its beta-test requirements to get dozens of fixes and enhancements into the community. Beta-test is a status restricted to HP support customers. No, HP did not report it would do this for the six dozen software projects that it has built and tested since 2004.

Instead, the audience got a repeat performance. Hou, speaking on behalf of HP management, repeated the "virtual" HP 3000 division was "investigating" one need or another. In HP's process of delivering anything to the community, "investigation" is only the first step of a process that includes "funding" and then "planning" and finally "development." Oh, and the testing, if needed. Many HP projects have never gone beyond investigation.

For a list of what's still in limbo, across three releases of MPE/iX, have a look at HP's roundup on what needs to be tested and released in 41 weeks' time.

Houston echoes community's streaks

While the Houston Rockets were winning their 21st NBA game in a row up the road, another streaking community held court at a campus known for its rockets. The University of Houston-Clear Lake boasted a legendary aeronautics program and hosted the Greater Houston RUG (GHRUG)  International Technology Conference. The meeting marked the 38th straight year that the HP 3000 community gathered face-to-face. It was also the fifth year of meetings since HP halted its 3000 sales.

In Houston, another streak remained intact. For the sixth straight springtime, HP did not offer details for its 3000 endgame issues, such as source-code licensing and the elease of beta test patches. HP's 3000 labs now have less than 41 weeks remaining to complete work on the operating system before closing up.

However, HP did not confirm that the virtual HP 3000 will vanish at the end of 2008. The question was asked during an HP update session about the 3000 — a computer platform which wasn't the only system that GHRUG speakers addressed.

GHRUG maintained a two-conference streak on keynote speakers, hearing Adager's Alfredo Rego launch the second day of the meeting for the second straight conference. "I am not going to try to convince you of anything here, but just to tell some stories for your benefit," he said. But the HP 3000 advocate did arrive at the meeting with a copy of the latest Entertainment Weekly, which featured an older Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones on the cover, along with the headline, "Why He's Still Hot." Like the HP 3000, this is a story the audience won't grow tired of hearing.

Rego shared his research on Ford, pointing out a few things the star has in common with the HP 3000.

"I am like old shoes," Rego quoted Ford. "I have never been hip. I have never been enough in fashion to be replaced by something new."

Understanding chuckles rose up from the early morning crowd. "It reminds me of the HP 3000," Rego said.

Talk at the conference did not run to details on the latest Right To Use license language, or where the business model might come from for a hardware emulator. OpenMPE didn't even give a presentation, but HP did offer both Alvinia Nishimoto and Jennie Hou as 3000-related speakers.

And maybe most important, for the future of the event, was the 100-plus participants who arrived for two lunches, two breakfasts and one impromptu cookout. GHRUG is going onward with this event, bolstered by 42 talks across two days of networking.

Nishimoto detailed HP's view of the migration away from the 3000. HP-UX, she said, is the target platform most favored by migration sites. she chalked up the choice to one 3000 essential tool: Robelle's Suprtool. The software isn't available on Windows and is in wide use in the 3000 community.

HP's quotes went as far back as 1995 to cover satisfied customers who'd migrated. Windows is stable enough, too. Windows is being driven by packaged applications.

OpenMPE didn't update its plans or progress at the meeting, but asked pointed questions in the HP presentations. Emulator projects didn't come up, either. But attendees could learn more about using Network Attached Storage with a 3000, or a Baker's Dozen tips on working with HP 3000s. More on those tomorrow.

What can HP say today?

The Greater Houston RUG International Technology Conference opens today. HP is scheduled to give an update about its HP 3000 strategy and plans for 2007-08. Since 2