Securing 3000 FTP: Clients yes, servers no

When long-time 3000 customer Eveready Insurance asked if Secure FTP (SFTP) is available for the server, the short answer was yes. And no.

A client version of the software to secure file transfers has been available for the 3000 for some time. What the 3000 lacks for now is a secure FTP server module. This means that the HP 3000 must initiate each secure file transfer process.

HP's response center engineer Cathlene McRae has pointed customers to a 2008 HP white paper on the subject of securing 3000 file transfers, a document which is honest about how much MPE's FTP supports industry standards. McRae admitted that MPE/iX doesn't provide a version of SFTP in addition to the 3000's regular FTP/iX. Once the invent3k public access development server accounts are restored for the community -- a project OpenMPE has been working on since September -- a true SFTP server module might proceed toward a release. A volunteer for that project would have to step up, too.

HP's white paper reports that it created a script called crypt that can secure 3000 transfers. The good news is that even though HP has closed down its Jazz server, crypt is still available to the community. Speedware is hosting crypt (a tarball that can be downloaded) as part of its collection of Jazz programs.

HP's paper says in part:

HP has designed a script which will allow FTP/iX users to transfer files securely from MPE/iX to remote systems running HP-UX, Linux, MPE/iX etc. The script provides an option to encrypt files prior to the transfer. Depending on this “encrypt” option and a few other considerations, the file will be encrypted using the POSIX CRYPT utility, before it is transferred via FTP/iX.

Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies has explained the differences between full SFTP support and the state of secure transfers using MPE/iX 7.5. In a report from earlier this year, Edminster said "while files can be put to or retrived from other systems, since only the SFTP client is available, the 3000 must originate the transaction. This can make for some process redesigns if your existing applications are used to your 3000 being the ‘server’."

That SFTP server module -- the element that prevents 3000 managers from saying the system supports SFTP -- is in a double limbo this month. A first pass at creating a port of OpenSSH for MPE/iX is included in the invent3k files of Ken Hirsch. But invent3k, like the Contributed Software Library and the Jazz programs, is still being set up by OpenMPE. Speedware and Client Systems haven't signed up to host invent3k. OpenMPE's mission remains keeping the 3000 up to date, once these porting projects become available to the community once again.

Migrations lift, shift, exchange commands

Speedware announced the third phase of its online tool transfer from HP yesterday, as the migration partner rolled out the old MPE-to-HP-UX utilities on a new Web resource. The tools include a Commands Cross-Reference, an MPE to HP-UX Programming API Cross-Reference, as well as a cross reference for MPE to HP-UX System Administration Functions. All are in sync with the most reliable means to replace a 3000 application, something Speedware's Chris Koppe calls lift and shift.

At this year's e3000 Community Meet, Koppe related the story of how essential it was for a client to retain the logic and architecture of its 3000 apps in a move to HP-UX. ScreenJet's Alan Yeo, a provider for tools for do it yourself migration projects, said that some customers making a migration have asked "I'd like my bugs migrated, too."

In our video from the Meet, Koppe reveals background from the migration story of Australian insurance firm ING, which Speedware helped migrate during 2008. The alternative to lift and shift is replacement applications. The ideal situation for minimum change is the same third party app hosted on a new environment: more often Windows for the typical 3000 user, but sometimes HP's Unix.

Koppe said that ING's CIO didn't want to expose the company's data to scrutiny during the migration. Moving the data to Eloquence, the CIO said "if we have to look at the data, the project is a non-starter." Compliance issues would have risen up if the data had to be massaged in any way during the migration, Koppe said.

Further along in the video, after Yeo's lift and shift admonition and Koppe's peek at secret data, the Support Group inc's David Floyd made a pitch for ample migration of a system's documentation. If the expert on how a 3000 app leaves for whatever reason, including an untimely demise, "it's the people in this room who'll have to solve problems, because it becomes mission-critical knowledge at that point."

Interim homesteading, of any duration, precedes a migration. Engaging an offsite expert who's learned an application from an in-house system manager -- while transition proceeds using HP's cross reference utilities -- provides insurance for the lifting and shifting.

<> Cross-Reference

Snapshots form pictures for 3000 repositories

Official documentation for the HP 3000 has a lifespan, a period of time that's not measured like a book's bindings or any crumbling foundation of a library. Manuals and documents about how to operate a 3000 thrive upon the interest and care from the community. Speedware said at the latest e3000 Community Meet that it wants to be a repository for such 3000 knowledge.

Chris Koppe, the company's marketing director who is also the 2010 Connect user group president, reported that Speedware took snapshots of the documentation that was removed from the HP's Web servers last December. "If you're missing anything that was in HTML, some see us," he said at the Meet. Documents which used to be available in either HTML or PDF formats now only appear as PDFs. Koppe said that while Speedware still can't host official 3000 documentation, HP advised them to "take a snapshot of all of it last year -- early, just in case."

HP spread that advice around the user community about this time last year, when it had begun to issue its final communications with the community. The vendor's migration effort may be erasing some edges of HP's picture of documentation, so outside respositories are important to preserve 3000 practices. "As part of the migration," said Eloquence database creator Michael Marxmeier at the Meet, "some documents might just vanish, and it's difficult for a large organization to restore them."

HP gave customers that advice to capture any needed documents last year, then took its Jazz server offline for good to remove scores of documents and programs. Early this year the vendor struck deals with several companies to host white papers, training materials and free utility software. The 3000 system and software documentation was also a part of those deals, but it was licensed with a caveat. Outside companies can't offer these docs until HP stops serving them.

That kind of change can happen overnight, but at the moment HP has promised that it will remain the repository of 3000 documentation until 2015. The vendor's support business is scheduled to end five years earlier -- a point in time when the more repositories exist, the better coverage for the community.

Chris Bartram, the founder of the 3000's Technical Wiki and host of dozens of public utility programs at 3k.com, said he believes HP's long timelines for exiting 3000 services are part of a strategy. OpenMPE, which also wants to be known as the 3000's repository, endured years of delays and HP deliberations about the vendor's plans to hand off the stewardship of 3000 intelligence.

I wished OpenMPE good luck when they set off so many years ago, but I firmly believe that some at HP knew it was probably in their best interest to drag things on long enough -- without actually saying no and pissing people off -- so by the time anything was handed over, there would be so little demand left that HP could be sure they had milked all the "conversions" (and related new hardware purchases) they could. I guess it's getting close to that point -- so I'm not sure if I'm happy for OpenMPE, or sad.

The challenge in preparing for a far-off transfer of information like manuals, or moving support contracts by the end of 2010, is that any new resources must ramp up and then wait for their turn as stewards. Speedware, which contracted for hosting of 3000 manuals, must keep them archived and ready for whatever day HP decides manuals will not be online at HP anymore. "The idea here is to make sure that nothing gets lost over time," Koppe said, "so it has a home somewhere."

Whether it's Speedware, with its contracts, resources and HP data in hand, or OpenMPE -- trying to get its HP docs cleaned up to host on a new Jazz/Invent3k server -- any alliance of 3000 community members won't be earning much from doing this repository work. The only real profits come from showing love for the beloved server still at the heart of so many careers and companies.

"We're not really making any money in this market anymore," said Bartram, who sold 3000 e-mail application software during the 1990s and still supports it. "So it's still more of a labor of love -- or love lost."

Serve Up Yourself - Connect to a Community

    If you want to be connected, social networks will link you into whatever you need to know right away. The world’s wildest and widest social net, Twitter, can put you in direct and immediate contact with anyone who’s a member. Millions of people, posting all around the wide world, can make you smarter, funnier and richer. (Sorry, not thinner. There’s only so much an electronic medium can do.)

    If only there were more HP 3000 community members on Twitter. I can see the eyes rolling for many of my readers at this moment. They believe don’t have the time to plug in to social networks like Facebook, Linked In, the Connect User Group’s community, or even others. “I have enough to do already,” they argue, and then might add a quip that they have a real life.

    That’s a more current argument if your professional life doesn’t span a world any larger than your county, state or province. As an IT pro, your field is as wide as your ambition and desire to grow and learn. If you don’t network using the tools of the Web, you’d better be traveling to meetings and conferences.

    I enjoyed the glee of mixing both in-person and online networking this fall. At the latest e3000 Community Meet I sat in the front row of a Hyatt hotel room to listen and ask questions. I also spread Twitter tweets in pretty-much live broadcasting. I get excited about that broadcasting prospect because of my dad’s work while I grew up. He engineered broadcasts for WSPD-TV. That was my first taste of being a part of the media. At the Meet I got to shoot video which is up on the NewsWire's YouTube channel. It's another way to podcast, one where the speakers are featured instead of your host/editor.

    There are light years between dad’s days lifting and mounting 6-pound videotape reels of news and talk shows, and my unreeling just-announced 3000 news from a laptop keyboard, or my iPhone. Today I feel grateful to have experienced this evolution of media. You might feel as fortunate to have survived the ENQ/ACK black arts days of enterprise computing management. Your journey has carried computing so far that now some experts predict a small company won’t be able to afford to employ enough IT gurus.

    That last belief provides a very good reason to network in social and business settings. IT skills and practices are still valuable, both to your livelihood and to companies around the world. However, finding in-person daily employment presents greater challenges than ever. Working has become a world wide pursuit. Nets, wide like Twitter and business-focused like Linked In, extend and improve your reach.

    So having presented this pitch to connect over social nets, let me pause to explain where a few favorite links lie. Follow us at our feed on twitter.com/3000newswire. Every day the stories at the right generate automatic notice as they surface. Get your experience posted on Linked In. Staying in personal touch can help partnerships, so Facebook plays a role. 156 members belong to the Linked In 3000 Community group. Join us. You can experiment just as you might learning perl or ITIL practices. Keep your postings as modest as e-mails, but share what you learn. Become a community source.

3000 shareware lives at 3k.com

Some programs from the former HP shareware server Jazz are online at Speedware and Client Systems hosts. But some are not -- especially the 3000 tools written by the user community. One of the best repositories of such 3000 programs is still online and serving software. 3k.com is, as its founder and curator Chris Bartram says, "a site with arguably the largest collection of public domain/shared software, or links to the such software on the Internet."

We agree, and want to note that 3k.com was always a Web resource with more scope than the now-defunct Jazz. The 3k Associates site hosts a 3000 technical Wiki, did a 3000 FAQ before that, hosts a raft of technical papers, has a link to the freeware from 3000/9000 support vendor Beechglen, points to another set of tools from Allegro Consultants, and has been home to the biggest directory of HP 3000 software products. How long has this resource been around? Well, 3k.com is a two-character Web address. You simply can't buy those anymore, having been snapped up long before the 3000 business was closed off at HP.

HP closed down Jazz one year ago this month, but the vendor did more than pull the plug on the freeware server. As we've reported before, the Jazz programs are now walled off by a 40-page End User License Agreement. At least the ones that HP engineers developed for free use by the community. The third-party tools that were hosted on Jazz aren't covered by the HP EULA. That's where 3k.com comes in, during a time when OpenMPE is still working to try to get its hosting site open to the public.

The OpenMPE initiative will add a new dimension to a 3000 Web resource, whenever it finally goes online. The servers will host the Jazz contents from HP, as well as the invent3k public development server facility. It's taking longer than expected to bring OpenMPE's Jazz and invent3k.openmpe.org online. The holdup is the state that HP left its Jazz pages in: full of HP logos and references that the vendor demands be excised by third parties.

It's been suggested that this kind of Web housecleaning is a straightforward process using perl or awk, but until recently the volunteer OpenMPE team didn't have this kind of experience. HP certainly knew perl and awk, but it just turned over Jazz in its unauthorized rehosting state. OpenMPE gained a new volunteer this week to help in its Jazz hosting. But HP could have spared the advocacy group, Speedware and Client Systems all the legally required exorcism work.

Shareware, by a popular definition, is software without restrictions for use or sharing, donated to a community. It's good that Speedware, Client Systems and even more so, 3k, have maintained the concept. OpenMPE will have to abide by that nettlesome HP EULA to keep the vendor's donated programs online. This release could have been done with more elegance and attention to the spirit of the free tools. While it's fair to appreciate the work that someone in HP did to free up Jazz's shareware, the delays in presentation by the new hosts illustrate another spot where HP "didn't think of that." OpenMPE directors say that answer was uttered frequently by HP while it responded to OpenMPE's requests.

We'd say "Free Jazz now," but that would involve OpenMPE ignoring the HP EULA. With the likes of 3k.com's wide array, as well as Speedware and Client Systems sites (both were delayed by the HP logo purge), the software is free now. Just not as free of the memory of HP's need for controls while it exits your community.

Connect board election nears finale

The Connect user group for HP enterprise customers will close its voting for a 2010-11 board on Nov. 12. This election of directors is following a pattern HP 3000 customers will recognize from OpenMPE board voting. The number of seats open equals the number of candidates on the slate. For any company pursuing an HP 3000 migration, however, this organization has a lot to offer in networking opportunities.

In situations like an election without a contested seat, members understand their vote won't influence the outcome of the balloting. But voting will keep you engaged and more interested in what the board of directors will propose for the year to come. This year's slate of directors includes a candidate from the HP 3000 community running for re-election. Steve Davidek of the City of Sparks, Nevada is volunteering for a term that runs through 2011.

Connect members are the only people who can vote. Membership is only $50 for a year for an individual. You can cast a ballot after looking over the slate at the Connect site, then following the link to vote. 

One of the best resources Connect offers is a lively Twitter feed, managed by Kees den Hartigh. The Community Manager and an officer of a Netherlands user group, den Hartigh posts news from the HP that's the destination of HP3000 migrations, offering Unix and industry standard system updates. Follow den Hartigh on Twitter via @Connect_WW.

Connect is also building a 3000 user group community online, led by its president-elect Chris Koppe of Speedware and Speedware product manager Nick Fortin. The 3000 NewsWire's Twitter feed is part of the page, which is working to gain momentum among members. The Connect site has introduced an upgrade to the user interface for the group just last week.

Links to 3000 via Unix, Linux stay free

Companies which continue to rely on the HP 3000 connect to the system using other servers. In this case, other means non-3000 computers, especially running Linux and various flavors of Unix. A free program was once available to install on the Unix or Linux host, but freevt3k has been found recently and rehosted for public use. It works with block mode well enough to drive the NMMGR tool shown above.

Mark West of Car Hop, an auto sales and finance firm, needed to perform this kind of link, but discovered that the known links to freevt3k through telemon.com have gone dead. West dug up the source code for the utility, rehosted it in a forge on SourceForge.net, then told the community about its lost-then-found resource.

I've been trying to find a suitable terminal to access the HP3000 servers we use at work. I made a couple of small corrections and set up a sourceforge project to store the freevt3k code on. While I’m sure this isn’t the most recent copy, at least it’s been saved from the lost and found. I’ll be happy to accept any patches sent to me.

Freevt3k made its debut in the late 1990s. HP discontinued its NS VT3K product, which allowed HP 9000s to log into the HP 3000. HP-UX 11.0 and later versions no longer support a pathway from outside systems into HP 3000s. But freevt3k a means to let users onto the systems if you don't want to use telnet. (Some companies have restrictions on telnet services into HP 3000s, but no limits on proprietary, internal access.) A freeware project created this shareware version of VT3K.

The version of the software that West has provided has Linux binaries and a Unix source tarball for download. Notes in the README file deliver instructions on how to use it.

COBOL offers you can't refuse

For a 50-year-old language, COBOL seems to have a lot of new options and energies lately. Especially for 3000 customers who are making migrations, the ones looking around for their next platform and language. For millions of companies around the world, COBOL is an offer they cannot refuse.

We've recently heard from Chuck Townsend, a COBOL and modernization consultant who helped launch the software vendor LegacyJ. He recalls that LegacyJ "implemented the HP COBOL syntax, the HP Intrinsics (excluding IMAGE), the HP Macro capability and you might remember the VPlus capability as well." So LegacyJ offers a COBOL for use on platforms other than the 3000. One that claims to know something about the 3000.

Then there's ACUCOBOL-GT. It was easy to believe that ACUCOBOL would decline in favor of Micro Focus COBOL, when MF bought Acucorp in 2007. But Alan Yeo of ScreenJet reminds us that:

The ACUCOBOL product is still available, and we have migrations that are still in progress with our ACUCOBOL GUI conversion for VPlus products. In fact, Micro Focus are adapting that technology as the Thin Client GUI for the Micro Focus COBOL products. Like the 3000, rumours of ACUCOBOL's death appear premature.

Now that Micro Focus owns the product, it may not be as easy to ask for ACUCOBOL by name, but the GT suite still appears for sale on the Micro Focus Web site. What's even more interesting at that MF site is a pep talk by analyst Dale Vecchio of Gartner, above. The research VP comes across as a consigliere (mob elder statesman) in a six-minute sermon about why retirements are good for IT's future. He seems to invoke that image with his comparison of IT practices and the methods of The Sopranos.

Let's be clear about why Vecchio is speaking in the 6-minute video at the Micro Focus site. (Registration required.) He's advising IT managers and directors to get busy. Gartner people like to incite. Make changes, he says, or you'll believe the same thing Albert Einstein said. "Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal," Vecchio quotes Einstein. It appears Einstein actually said something like this, but then Vecchio adds to the quote, "no good can come of it." 

(Web resources agree that Einstein said technological progress, not change. This distinction has always been the undoing of change cheerleaders like Vecchio. Progress is something the IT pros must accomplish. The analysts and vendors will only supply the change, unless you hire them for it. We'll leave it as an exercise for our readers to determine the context of the quote from Einstein, who's invoked for everything from IT to baby development videos.)

The good news, Vecchio says, is that the people in IT are retiring who believe change is no good. It's a bit naive for Vecchio to think that stubborn IT managers and CIOs are standing in the way of improvements, unless they own their companies. Change -- whether it's adopting Micro Focus COBOL instead of the ACUCOBOL solution, or embracing even wider like cloud computing or the .NET distinction -- needs to show proof of success, or it's just an experiment.

The need for proof is what keeps 50-ish IT professionals on the job when they'd rather be retired. What you know remains an asset to your company. Proven success keeps COBOL running much of the world's business computing, 50 years after the language was invented. It's hard to refuse something that's worked for this long -- if its community keeps reinventing it. If your IT efforts include care for languages and programs, like so many do, then caring about your next COBOL should be an issue to investigate.

Developers work to preserve power to port

Several developers in the 3000 community are working to preserve a key tool for porting software to the computer's MPE/iX operating system. The magic wand is the GNU C++ compiler suite, bootstrap software needed to move open source utilities onto the 3000, or keep them updated for security and functionality.

Mark Klein of DIS International did the port of C++ back in the middle '90s, a crucial step to porting Java, Internet networking tools, Samba file sharing, perl, Web services and more onto the 3000. Klein hosted the suite on an account at Invent3k, the public access development 3000 HP closed down in November of last year. Invent went dark and the programs, accounts and tools went offline. For a short while, even Klein couldn't be sure he had the bootstrap software on a server in his own lab.

HP's 2009 policies on Invent3k and Jazz content aimed to share such resources with the community. But a 40-page HP End User License Agreement (EULA) inserted restrictions, terms and fees to control where such freeware and open source software can be hosted. The vendor did not simply pass along code and utilities written by third parties. New hosting outlets must arrange their own agreements to host the independent tools, now that HP has closed up these resources.

Much of it was built on the back of Klein's work, volunteer nights and weekends for the equivalent of a year of full-time coding. The new language opened the door for the HP 3000’s interoperability. He reported today, "I may just host the GNU stuff here in my lab, and at OpenMPE." A third outlet for open source is getting ready to open, too.

Brian Edminster is polishing up his open source repository for the community, a project born of his company Applied Technologies' use of open source in consulting, 3000 migration and management assignments.

In the meantime, OpenMPE promised in September to have its invent.openmpe.org server up by now, a mirror of the software HP hosted until late last year. Meanwhile, the HP re-hosting agreements for its Jazz shareware have erected a licensing requirement around what was once a genuine shareware resource. Some of the HP-modified utilities were built upon code that carried open source GNU licenses. The new EULA through the HP Jazz agreement might run roughshod over GNU shareware terms, said Edminster.

Klein doesn't approve of the new restrictions, either. "I'm not happy about the HP licensing decison," he said. In the meantime, one well-known porting expert in the 3000 community needed the CCC tool recently. Klein sent him the code he created and holds the rights to, e-mailed direct.

For now, that's the only outlet for CCC. Speedware and Client Systems opened re-hosted Jazz content servers this year, but the independent tools like Klein's aren't a part of those servers yet. OpenMPE remains the only organization committed to bringing Invent3k back online.

A word on how to catch our words quickly

 Permit us to pause a moment to show readers how to get immediate notice of our reports. We'd also like to highlight a new reason to return to our front page during the day to see mini-updates.

Twitter makes both of these features possible. The moment a blog article is posted, Twitter notifies you if you're following @3000newswire on the service. Even if you don't participate in Twitter, the note appears in our Twitter section of this page -- right-hand column, just under the Transoft ad.

That's also the spot where our mini-updates appear, as well as in your Twitter feed if you follow us. (Do you see a pattern here? We like Twitter because tweet have to be short: 140 characters or less. For an old print headline writer like me, it's a fun challenge.) We're working on one or two Twitter extras during the workdays, sometimes with a link. We'll do Outtakes, since most stories have more material than we can use. We don't want to wear out our welcome. Readers have things to do in addition to keeping up with what's new or helpful.

You can also get our reports sent to you via other services. Twitter is hot now. But there's other technology to keep our news on your plate.

Some of our audience uses newsreader software to take our daily feeds. This is powered by the RSS standard. Bruce Hobbs, a veteran 3000 developer, swears by Google Reader. There are others, some tied to mail services like Yahoo, others standalone programs. Newsreaders give you a timeline of articles, just like our blog does. You control what you see, although the helpful Twitter links won't be on a newsreader feed.

How to newsread? Right-hand column again, just above the Community Comments. "Subscribe to this blog's feed." One click and you're on the way to having the 3000 NewsWire appear in your reader.

Several years ago, we invited readers to send a request to have us e-mail a "Blog Me" update when articles appeared. Twitter gives us a foolproof way to avoid the spam boxes with your requests. Weekly or so, we will remind you of the articles, via e-mail. But the best way to stay up to the minute, and keep up with updated tweets, is through Twitter or on this page.

We return you now to our regular coverage, in this main column, on individual category or article pages -- or over on the Twitter feed at right. Follow us.

Community Meet slides go online

Speedware's Chris Koppe, president-elect of the HP Connect user group, announced this morning that the presentations from last week's e3000 Community Meet are available online.

The six sets of PowerPoint slides can be downloaded from www.hpmigrations.com/sfevent

The slide sets include Koppe's own, which detail the efforts the user group is making for the 3000 community, as well as a Speedware update on migration and homesteading issues. Speedware offers a service to manage 3000 applications for customers who are homesteading, as well as its migration tools and services.

Other slide sets online today are from Transoft, presenting migration and application upgrade information; an update from ScreenJet's Alan Yeo about its modernization tools; David Floyd of the Support Group, explaining sustainability options and services; and OpenMPE secretary Donna Hofmeister, presenting details on the group's campaign to fund an MPE/iX source license (as well as services coming online soon.)

We have video and audio from these talks we're working to edit and post here in the days to come.

Our 3000 reports move into a 15th year

The 3000 NewsWire celebrates its birthday today, tying a bow on 14 years of publishing which began in 1995. In the fall of that year my partner Abby and I began our delicious journey through your community, one that remains without an end in sight. While we move into our 15th year, I remember some in the community wondered how we'd find anything to publish in Issue 2.

The NewsWire's pages, both printed and those we flung onto the fledgling World Wide Web, had to prove the concept of a 3000-only publication. We promoted the platform by highlighting the changes to its solutions. HP was already calling the HP 3000 a "legacy" system during 1995, even while people in the 3000 division worked to bring the platform up to date.

In October of 1995, HP was just starting to embrace the idea of serving small customers with the 3000's fastest technology. We called the Series 9x9 servers Kittyhawks in our Page One article, using HP's code name. (Click on the image above to read that front page.) System configurations were a major part of a 3000 customer's duty in that day, so we reported HP was finally adding an 8-user MPE/iX license to the entry model of the 9x9 line. HP said you could get the latest generation 3000 at under $50,000, we reported with an asterisk,"before disks, console and networking cards are added." Most customers needed to add one or more of these elements, but HP was still trying to improve the image of the 3000's value.

Another kind of image was important in that first issue, the 3000 database of the same name. We launched our first at-deadline issue of the FlashPaper with a report on the new leader of the IMAGE/SQL lab, Tien-You Chen. The vendor community was pleased with the move, since it looked like the database group was getting a leader devoted to results rather than policy.

Chen has a can-do style. In a meeting with several partners over TurboStore integration, someone in the meeting suggested that “an HP file system engineer would really help us here.” Chen excused himself, got up and came back with the engineer.

Of course, much of what seemed novel and important 14 years ago has aged into history. We looked over the first issue's story lineup to see that top HP executives (like CEO Lew Platt) were still praising the platform in public, when pressed. HP could show a wrinkled side of its image to the 3000 faithful, too: 3000 division executives made a show of taking off their jackets en masse at an Interex conference roundtable. Although roundtables and HP executive comments on the 3000 have evaporated, our first issue carried news that resonates in today's community. A powerful object-oriented compiler was being launched, C++, "which promised better products sooner" for the 3000. It remains a key tool to keep the 3000's future smooth, no matter how long you've decided to remain on the computer's path.

HP once operated a repository for the 3000 version of GNU C++ source, hosted on the Invent3k public development server. But when HP closed down Invent3k almost a year ago, the compiler had to find a public home. OpenMPE will include the compiler on its invent3k.openmpe.org resource, opening later this month.

This open source tool will be needed to keep the more modern ports to the 3000 up to date in years to come. It's so essential, said our columnist John Burke, that

Without Mark Klein’s initial porting of and continued attention to the GNU C++ compiler and utilities on the HP 3000, there would be no Apache/iX, syslog/iX, sendmail/iX, bind/iX, etc. from Mark Bixby, and no Samba/iX from Lars Appel. And the HP 3000 would still be trying to hang on for dear life, rather than being a player in the new e-commerce arena.

And our first issue covered a new HP initiative to spark integration in the manufacturing sector, carried out by six North American partners.

The integrators will offer customers one of three strategies to assist them in examining their information infrastructure, with the goal of implementing Customer Oriented Manufacturing Management (COMMS systems):
    1. To retain systems while expanding use of software features and increasing processing power using strategies such as COMMS;
    2. To supplement systems such as MRP II with more comprehensive software on current computer platforms or additional environments; or
    3. To migrate manufacturing systems to newer “Choices Approved” software solutions such as Ross Systems' Renaissance CS or  Spectrum's PointMan.

So even while the first NewsWire was hitting the mailboxes of October, 1995, this newsletter was acknowledging that migration was one choice in moving ahead. Something else hasn't changed since that month. One of those six partners remains vital in the 3000 community: the Support Group, inc.

Like a lot of your world, tSGi is concerned with continuity. Today the company's president David Floyd, son of the founder Terry Floyd, celebrates his birthday while tSGi leads customers into both homestead and migration futures. We're happy to share a birthday with him, while we work toward "many happy returns of the day." Thank you for reading us for 14 years, and for the support of our partners and sponsors into another generation, starting with today.

Partners assemble at Community Meet

In another era we might have called them vendors, but the attendees at this month's e3000 Community Meet came together as partners. The 40 people who assembled at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt have been working together, or have that potential in the years to come when the terms users and vendors don't fit like they once did. Only three of the group could be called "users" in the old term. But those terms are "being deprecated," as old software like Java/iX has done. When HP steps out of the 3000 room in about 15 months, the phrase third-party won't even be accurate to describe the companies and experts who talked and listened all day on Sept. 23.

In a unique beginning, the master of ceremonies Alan Yeo invited everyone present at the start of the day to introduce themselves. We got almost everybody on our hand-held video camera to record the players who were taking the stage. We're introducing this video resource via a fresh 3000 NewsWire channel on YouTube, the world's steaming pile of entertainment, advertising, comedy, and frothing dissent. Of those four, only good humor was on tap in the e3000 meeting room. (There was dissent, but of the kind that doesn't end discussions or ruin chances to partner.)

Brian Duncombe started off the introductions, traveling out of his retirement to attend after he created performance and clustering software in the 1980s and '90s. Consultant Bruce Hobbs in his trademark beard was also on the front row, along with consultant Jim Snider. Then we caught up again with Michael Watson's introduction. Watson reported he's still developing in COBOL, as were several others on that front row.

HP was present in the back of the room, as support engineer Cathlene McRae attests at the end of the intros. After lunch, HP's Alvina Nishimoto sat in the back and offered some insights during a roundtable session of more than an hour. James Hofmeister, working in support of Linux customers for HP, was also on hand.

Some people in the community hope this Meet might gather as many users than vendors. At this stage of the 3000's legend, those are the same attendees. Putting people together in a room all day sparks plans and renews trust. As the evening winked out, a sketch was emerging for 2010 Meet that focuses on training.

Social nets can narrow-cast to wide group

A healthy slug of video, audio and photos rode back in my laptop from this week's e3000 Community Meet. I also took away the warmth of connecting with friends I had not seen in years, people who made important contributions to the life and growth of the 3000. But one part of that rich day, unrecorded, was my own attempt at humor and inspiration, urging everyone to connect through social networks.

This talk began its life as writing on a screen, however, something you'd expect from a fellow who writes his way through life. I share it here and hope that it makes you smile and consider staying in touch until the next Meet via a social net of your choice. We track many major nets here at the NewsWire, using tools like the free TweetDeck console shown above. I hope to hear from you on the nets, or up here in our blog's comments.

Social Network Harm and Help: Advice & Wisecracks

Do you tweet? (All feathered creatures need not try to answer in English). Or share your life on Facebook? Or Digg your Web discoveries, or pile them up in a Delicious box? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

If not, you're in a big group. Maybe not the 70 million people rumored to be using one of these social networks. There's so many more, like the unique one that user group Connect operates, or the public Linked In site. Or Plaxo. Or something new, Cummerbund. (Sorry, just making that last one up.)

That fact about Cummerbund shows a little of the harm in this powerful new tool. You can make something up, and if it's not easily checked in a Google probe, it can get traction. The shorter the report, the easier it becomes to disguise or mistake. Take this tweet from Twitter, posted by @AngelaAtHP:

I witnessed a woman squeal and clap when she test-drove this new HP web-enabled printer at D23

This “tweet” on Twitter then included a link to a Web site. If you noticed Angela's Twitter name, you wouldn't be surprised where her link took you:

So Angela got eyeballs for her message that led to the HP printer Web page. Nearly 2,000 people follow her tweets, and so many of us tweet to others about her stuff. Warning: If follow her, she averages 5-10 tweets a day. Connect has a good tweeter who re-tweets, and so the HP user group helps spread the message of marketing from Angela LoSasso, employed by HP's printer marketing team to spread the marketing gospel about great printer solutions.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they said on Seinfeld. But when a message that short gets re-tweeted, it's lost all of its context unless you dig for it. You gotta admit, a woman squealing over a computer is pretty compelling. You either want to know something more about the computer product, or about the woman. Angela would rather you poke into what's cool about that Web-enabled printer.

Get used to it: There are many people in the generation behind us in this room who are paid to spread this stuff. You might even enjoy it, so long as there's nothing at stake. Information seems to have less and less at stake as we hurtle out of the Ought years and into the next decade.

Angela -- I know I'm picking on her, but all in sport, I love tweeters -- tells us “I'm in the storytelling business. How can I help you tell yours?” I felt so with-it when I heard this. (Does anybody even say "with it" anymore?) I've been in the storytelling business for a few years myself. But longevity doesn't matter so much in storytelling, not even in journalism. Nobody cared much that I was 27 when I edited my first HP newspaper. (Good thing, considering how little I knew.)

And we didn't have social networking to check up on the likes of me, thank goodness. Just like they used to say, “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog,” I could say back in 1984, “On the telephone, I hoped nobody knew I was a callow “yut,” as those fellas called themselves in the film My Cousin Vinnie.

So I learned enough about the 3000 to stop being called an imbecile, “and no one was the wiser,” I thought. That wouldn't happen today, because we have social networking to check up on each other. And even though I started HP reporting in 1984, that Big Brother-esque checking up is a Good Thing. If you know how to use it to filter and add context.

Information is all about sources, to begin with. “Consider the source,” your mom might have told you when you said something about wearing this, or jumping off that. There's no better time than now to consider your source. The Internet disguised all the dogs. Social networks go further. They've hidden the sources behind personality. "How could that be a dog? He has such a rich baritone on the phone, and funny wisecracks." (Here I'm hoping that's what people said about me.) I fetch on command, though. I even point.

Back to the point. Social networks can help you fetch lots of information you didn't know you needed. Or even understand. They broaden your world. Just like a bigger map of where you need to go. But big maps, with lots of detail, need lots more charting skills.

You can do this. You crawled through the muck of ENQ/ACK sequences and pin-connection maps and even what the heck were the differences between Q-MIT and T-MIT. (Here's a hint; only one of them was a MPE release tape that an HP manager offered to eat.)

Detail is you, or we wouldn't have a world of computers tight and high flying enough to spread stories of women squealing at Web printers. (I know, you might be thinking, “and we really need this?”) You can do the detail of social networking, so long as you don't let it suck up all your real life.

There's the sin of over-sharing to avoid if you start to post to the social networks, too. People will tell you their lunch was a double swirl cone. (She didn't say where she got hers, dangit!) They will also report on more weighty topics. What you're looking for is facts, supported by real experience. It's not just enough to hear somebody say, “We gotta have this kind of health care or that.” Better to hear, “My mom is in the hospital and she can't get released soon enough, because her health plan doesn't pay for enough physical therapy.” You can say all that in less than 140 characters, so you could tweet it. I might ask, “What plan is that?” Or even offer some facts to help.

I bring up all of this nonsense because you are a group of IT pros who are renowned for community. A social network is a glue to keep you informed. I wish we'd all get a Twitter account and start following each other. Hey, you don't even have to tweet. Just being in the forest to hear the bird calls can help.

But only if you look for context, like who's sharing in the society. What their mission is in real life. (Google helps a lot in this kind of spelunking, but it's even better to ask around. Web pages can deceive. Remember those disguised dogs, now.)

I have become a real hound about social networks over the past year or so. I have accounts on all of these playgrounds. Some are more useful than others. You can look up my Delicious page of bookmarks, tweet or follow me personally or at 3000newswire, Friend me on Facebook, look me up on the new Connect myCommunity network for e3000 users. I started a Linked In group for the HP 3000 Community. There are also groups up there for the HP Way, 3000 Appreciation Society. I love it all. I find Twitter to be the biggest and woolliest universe, with Facebook a close second but richer in content. The more hurdles you need to clear to get into one of these, the better the caliber of the source.

Information is my job, though. I can float and find it rewarding to soar. If you find yourself flying too high to the sun, oh Icarus, and you feel your wings melting off your wax -- or maybe like Luke Skywalker, diving his X-Wing fighter too close to the Death Star -- pulla away, pull up, take back your time. Some say limit your social networking time, like you'd cut back on Splenda or See's Chocolates. Enjoy it, but make sure you have enough real life to share something new with the network. Contribute real content. Content will help you be heard, and that leads to giving you good stuff to listen to. The only way we learn anything is when we're listening

So the next time you hear the sound of squealing in a computer room, you'll know to look up from that browser, and listen for that drive in that RAID array going out. And ensure the storage device gets excluded and swapped automatically. And when the magic subsides, you can share a tweet if it all worked, or if not-so-much, then get some help. Because society is supposed to grow to help more of us, even though in each message we say less. Thanks for letting me say so much. In Twitter messages, this would have taken me more than 150 postings. And you still wouldn't have gotten in your message. I hope to hear from you out there soon, and often.

Making Jazz a Third-Party Presentation

OpenMPE is working to put its own brand on the 3000 freeware and whitepapers once hosted by HP -- as well as the Invent3k server for public development access. Client Systems has donated a server to give OpenMPE the hardware to complete in its efforts on Invent3k. OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister believes this donated Client Server system is the same one HP used when Hewlett-Packard hosted Invent3k.

Meanwhile, an N-Class server donated by Matt Perdue will host the Jazz contents from OpenMPE. Hofmeister outlined the work still to be completed.

"Just like Speedware did, we have to de-HP-ize all the HTML pages," she said. Webmaster Paul Raulerson is currently working on that.  So that's why it will take a bit longer before OpenMPE's Jazz is available." Client Systems brought out its version of Jazz this spring, while Speedware's made its debut this month.

 

HP shifts location of manuals

HP support engineer Cathlene McRae, who attended this week's e3000 Community Meet, reports that the HP 3000 and MPE/iX manuals have moved from the docs.hp.com location on HP's Web site. She said the new link is www.hp.com/bizsupport, a new HP Business Support Center Web site.

The HP 3000 manuals are among the first wave of documents to move off the old Web address, according to an HP notice.

The migration is being conducted in stages over the next year and the MPE/iX content has been migrated as part of the first phase. You will see a  redirection link under the MPE/iX section of the docs.hp.com homepage. It will take you to the landing page for the MPE/iX docs on the Business Support Center.

If you're plugging in a revised Web address for docs.hp.com for the 3000, it's www.hp.com/go/e3000-docs

HP has reorganized and standardized the presentation of the manuals for the 6.x and 7.x versions of the 3000's software and subsystems. The documentation is now available only in PDF documents; HTML versions existed on the HP site in the past.

McRae pointed to an HP document that explains, "To achieve a look and feel similar to docs.hp.com, all the manuals will be organized by categories within each group and in alphabetical order." Documentation for HP Linux systems, OpenVMS, and Tru64 Unix has also been moved in the first phase.

The 3000's documentation has been licensed to Client Systems and Speedware for re-hosting, but Speedware's Chris Koppe said during the Community Meet that HP won't permit these partners to host the manuals until HP clears the material from embargo. HP confirmed at the meeting that it will host the documentation through 2015. HP recommends that customers download patches and documents from the HP site for themselves before Dec. 31 of that year.

McRae also posted links to other HP documents which answer some questions posed during the Community Meet:

• An October 2008 communique on post 2010 beta test patch and manual availability, Invent3k plans and Right to Use license policies.
• The final January 2009 communique covering source code license initiatives, emulator availability and guidelines on receiving MPE/iX and subsystem media.
• The one-page FAQ from January 2009 about HP's 3000 "platform emulator" licensing policies.

OpenMPE announces Jazz, Invent3k portals

The OpenMPE user advocacy group yesterday announced the availability of its hosts for documents and programs licensed from the HP Jazz Web server. The Invent3k free public development 3000, closed down by HP last November, is now also available according to OpenMPE, with both Jazz and Invent3k hosted on 3000s operated by board member Matt Perdue.

Perdue said at yesterday's e3000 Community Meet that the two services are available with a free account and now reside behind a firewall. OpenMPE will be the first organization to host the public access development services of Invent3k, a 3000 HP once operated for developers to test and create MPE/iX software. OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister said that invent3k.openmpe.org will include the GNU development environment used to port open source software to MPE/iX.

Developers can request their free log-on account for Invent3k by e-mailing Hofmeister at donna@allegro.com

The resources the community is migrating from HP's Jazz Web server are still in a growth mode, Hofmeister added, just like those already online at Speedware. HP's licensing agreement restricted its software exchange to only the HP-created freeware off of Jazz, so freeware from third parties is being pursued for inclusion at the Jazz rehosting sites.

The relicensing partners such as Speedware and OpenMPE have made the third party programs available through links to authors' sites such as the one Lars Appel maintains for Samba. Other third party freeware still coming online include ports from Mark Bixby, the C++ tools ported by Mark Klein and other contributions. "We're in the process of getting permission from these people to put their software on the OpenMPE site," Hofmeister said during an update at the meeting.

OpenMPE also made an opening bid for a role as repository for the MPE/iX read-only source code which HP has been licensing this year. The vendor announced a license program for the 3000's source in February, but little else can be discussed by organizations and companies applying for or receiving a license. HP will not announce who the license holders are, but said this spring that it would consider ways that licensees can inform customers about receiving a source code license.

OpenMPE wants to act as a repository for the code, although other companies have also applied for licenses. The source licensing process is a black box, with all terms, lists of applicants and status of applications shielded under HP's Confidential Disclosure Agreement.

According to HP's CDA, OpenMPE can't even reveal the cost of the source code license. Perdue said at the meeting that purchasing the MPE license, "plus some start up cash to manage it" will require $25,000. The group has its license application ready to file for the source, but it needs a check for HP, and so kicked off a fundraising effort. One attendee, Applied Technologies' Brian Edminster, was ready to write a $1,000 check to spark the drive for the OpenMPE license.

Get connected today for Community Meet

In about six hours, at 10 AM PDT, close to three dozen veterans, experts and members of the 3000 community meet in San Francisco. The event has gathered momentum over a very brief three weeks, and the turnout will rival any head count in any HP 3000 conference meeting room over the past four years.

Some community members who can't be in the room at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt wish for a live streaming feed, or some kind of a Webcast hookup. That's not going to happen today, but there's hope for future meetings. For today, Twitter might provide the best real-time blurbs. You can follow what's happening through the NewsWire's Twitter feed. Go to twitter.com, and just "follow" our account, 3000newswire.

Those tweets, as the Twitter messages are known, will be brief. (Despite what my writing might suggest, I know brief, since tweeting requires the same kind of skill I've employed in writing headlines for the last 30 years.) I enjoy the challenge of saying something meaningful in 140 characters or less per Twitter message. For a community that knows how to stay within the bounds of 132-column screens, Twitter will have a familiar feel. You can tweet back, too. If you're versed in Twitter's "hashtags" (think of them as database keys), I'll be using #3kmeet for today.

There will be more, as battery life, memory cards and concentration provide. We'll have recordings (podcasts on this site), video (on YouTube) and photos to share, some more real-time than others. If you don't Twitter, consider signing on today (it's free) and following the feed. It takes an real-life event to spark a stream of tweets. We're glad to have an audience.

There's also time to participate if you're within a short drive of the hotel in Burlingame. In person, as we all know, is the richest experience.

You can register online (with details at the link), or just show up for the dinner in the evening at the hotel. I hope to see you there, snap your picture, and share an update or a story. Stay tuned, as we TV-era folks used to hear.

Speedware opens doors to Jazz rehosting

Speedware has announced the latest phase of its rollout of re-hosted programs from the HP Jazz site, a software resource that HP relicensed to two vendors this spring. Client Systems made the first effort at supplying a Jazz site earlier this year, followed by a set of migration training modules that Speedware put online. Now Speedware has extended its 3000 training resources to include freeware created by HP for the 3000 -- plus access to programs supplied by the community.

One notable addition to the 3000 Web resource family is this Third Party Utilities section at the Speedware site. Speedware's Nicolas Fortin explained these are links or files that were once located on HP's Jazz site but not provided to licensees by HP. This software includes shareware files created by Mark Bixby and Lars Appel, the two most prolific authors of open source, shareware utilities for the 3000. Speedware pursued the programs from these developers, linking to Appel's software and hosting the Bixby programs.

Fortin said that hosting these programs, along with what he calls the largest set of white papers for 3000s, requires more than hosting and creating links. There's an ongoing stewardship required to re-host the resource which HP once maintained as Jazz.

"Sometime in the near future, we’ll add a few more files to the Third Party Utilities section from Mark Bixby," he said. "Although the Jazz content is mostly static, in reality from time to time we might find ourselves improving it based on specific user requests, if it can help the community. For example, already a user e-mailed us to report that one of the tar files in the HP Software section was corrupted (the file was given to us that way). We managed to re-create that tar file by finding the content and re-packaging it, so now it’s available."

Fortin said that both Appel and Bixby "say they were happy to see the site go live." It's important to keep the work of these two engineers in the orbit of Planet 3000, since their contributions linked the platform with modern networking and Internet services. Bixby's Apache port and Appel's Samba port probably qualify among the more important software releases for the 3000 during the late '90s.

The launch that went live last Friday is the second phase of Speedware's HP site material relocation. HP Transition courses went online at Speedware this spring, and the MPE-to-HP-UX cross-reference tools will appear next. "It took more time than we expected," Fortin said, "but we decided to spend some additional effort to provide the community with some extra value-add, in addition to the content provided to us by HP."

New clouds conjure up established IT needs

Cloud computing will require just as many sound IT practices as anything operating at an internal datacenter today. But a pair of key offerings should be at the top of the list for any HP 3000 customer who's considering a shift to the cloud when their datacenter goes virtual, hosted and maintained by outside resources.

Security becomes essential in the cloud picture to a degree far above everyday operations. A company's sensitive and competitive data, from HR profiles to sales reports, will all pass through a network more easily exposed to breaches. A cloud computing resource needs to pass muster on elements such as datacenter door access, or security of any wireless networks at the datacenter. Donnie Poston of the Support Group inc, a vendor that's moving toward more cloud services in the 3000 community, outlined the top three elements tSGi considers important in providing cloud computing.

"The top three things that anyone has to provide are security of access, a 24x7 uptime and access to data, and adequate bandwidth," he said. If a customer is putting its critical applications into the cloud, these elements can be guaranteed with a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

SLAs with outsource agencies might be new to the 3000 customer still operating in a localized datacenter environment. Connectivity guarantees are part of remote hosting services from vendors such as DST Health Solutions. DST is a Business Process Outsourcer, the type of supplier that hosts servers and systems for clients in the healthcare industry. In 2006 DST purchased Amisys, the largest healthcare software vendor in the 3000 community.

3000 customers who face migration as an inevitability could shop patiently for cloud services and get more value than moving next year. An SLA signed in 2011 is likely to have more offered for less subscription fees than a deal during 2010. The hard deadline for HP support customers arrives on Jan. 1, 2011. The more traditional a cloud based solution's software — SAP, QAD, IFS for manufacturers, for example — the more there's to gained from waiting.

Those solutions will have to work hard to compete with open source cloud services, according to tSGi's Sue Kiesel. "If you look at open source, we already have a way of getting a low-cost entry into this environment," she said. "Open source is one of the things that's making cloud computing as viable as it is today."

The Support Group is working on a complete open source cloud computing offer, she added, including Customer Relationship Management, Demand Management, analytics to serve Business Intelligence needs, tools for Business Process Management. Desktop tools will be available that "look just like Word, and just like PowerPoint, so you can't see the difference anymore."

The tSGi team envisions specialization in sectors such as geographical location, business sector and even service to government agencies. In the US that last category got its first dedicated cloud provider from a surprising source: the government itself. Apps.gov opened for business this week to supply business apps, cloud IT services, productivity apps and social media apps to US government customers. The Federal government has a CIO in Vivek Kundra who said in a press release yesterday

Apps.gov is starting small – with the goal of rapidly scaling it up in size. Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services.

Counting on clouds to save green?

You have to go back to the veterans of timesharing with 3000s to find reality about cloud computing potential. Hewlett-Packard is pitching this concept -- sometimes called Software as a Service (SaaS). But companies of an average size may not see much savings, according to the Support Group inc's Sue Kiesel.

We talked with tSGi after we asked 3000 partners how much cloud they expected to cover the community with in the year to come. A few companies reported they'd spread a few clouds, tSGi among them. You'll want to have an extensive IT operation to count on the bottom-line greenback savings. And if you're not a Fortune 1000 company? The services will get updated on the big boys' schedule.

"They roll out the upgrades and inform you that you will be going to the new release," Kiesel said. "They'll probably schedule the upgrade based on what a customer the size of GE wants." You may be able to push back if you're of a certain size, but that size is big.

Not upgrading is a common choice, especially for the ERP customer like the ones that tSGi serves. Too much customization of an app makes a careful IT manager look hard at the work it will take to catch up to an upgraded version.

This disconnect between traditional app management and the easy promises of the cloud will keep skies pretty clear for HP 3000 sites -- even those that are migrating and can get a better match between their local hosts and the ones up in the cloud. ERP has been more fraught with customization than most other business segments.

The flip side of the cloud question is how much those SaaS clouds will save the big customers that are running the release schedule. "You won't get the cost savings at that level if you're the size of a GE," Kiesel said. "If you go into the cloud what you're usually saving are capital expenditures, which are very small."

HP counts some pretty large wins in cloud computing, organizations like the US Department of Defense. The adopters are few in number at this point. Clouds operate under subscription-based payments, and "the subscription fees are going to be way up there for a General Electric," Kiesel said. That outlay might even offset the savings of reducing local headcount in IT, which is another cloud promise.

tSGi operates another aspect of a cloud offering, managing HP 3000s installed at the firm's datacenter and operated on behalf of remote clients who connect over networks. This removes the 3000 from daily maintenance, and in the case of tSGi even gives the customer extra support for the ERP applications on the hosted systems. It can even give a company more time to complete a migration. That's important for some, now that HP's 2010 support deadline is only about 15 months away.

In a relocation of host model, a customer can benefit from access to the IT talent they can't afford to get, Kiesel said. "I can afford it as a provider because I have 100 customers," she explained. "My little 10-seat customer can't afford that talent because he's a small business."

Consolidating many small IT operations through a cloud-like service gives the planet a boost, to be sure. A massive footprint of a large IT shop is easy to target. But the combined carbon footprints of computer rooms dwarf the footprints of autos, Kiesel said.

"You might say that you have a small footprint, and what can you really save. But if you put 100 companies together, and you have a bottom line that depends on how efficient you can run your [cloud] services for them, you have a chance of minimizing the footprint for a lot of people. That's computing green."

HP retires docs link while experts retire

A computer system like the HP 3000 has been changing for the past eight years, even though the vendor is tugging at its plug through this decade. HP resources are edging out of the community's picture, even while the experts running systems in companies are retiring themselves.

One link customers will need is a Web connection to HP's 3000 documentation. Once printed in countless reams of bound paper, the knowledge is stored online. The location of the links has gotten more elusive. The most comprehensive start point recently edged off the docs.hp.com main page. This connection to HP manuals for supported products and HP engineer white papers is now at docs.hp.com/en/mpeixall.html

One example of the latter retirement is Greg Bell, a developer/analyst who's leaving a 37-year IT career this month at International Paper. Bell works at the Savannah, Ga. plant, where 3000s have been working since the Series III systems of the 1970s. Even as he exits this month, a pair of 3000s continue to work for this major corporation. There's no migration plan for two key applications there; new apps will move in, or the old ones will be mothballed.

Currently we have one Series 957 in Savannah running our last legacy applications, and one at our Prattville, Alabama mill doing the same. No migration to any other platform is planned -- the applications will be retired or replaced. I and another IT person here in Savannah provide support for the one system here and assist with the system in Prattville.

Bell says the 3000s have been static at International Paper over those past eight years, and that one at Savannah needs little more than a shutdown and reboot once in awhile. HP's exits from development and support have represented changes to the community, but not at this company.

With the exception of having to replace various parts -- which we do ourselves with third-party vendors providing those we’ve run out of from scavenging pieces from the other HP 3000s -- and the standard user setups/deletes, we have not done anything as far as the OS is concerned. We shut it down and reboot it every now and then to clean it up, but otherwise it just sits there and does its thing.

Bell has been at International Paper since the year the 3000 was first introduced. In 1972 the company was an IBM shop, but the 3000 made its footprints in the 80s and 90s running International Paper's financials. "We worked our way up from the Series IIIs to the 957/987 models. At our high point we had seven HP 3000s running all of our financial applications, and DEC servers running the production applications."

Working in IT long enough to call Digital "DEC" gives a hint at the scope of Bell's career. He's moving away to more personal projects after more than three decades that included midnight-oil challenges he met on the 3000s. "I wish I could say I will miss those 8-12 hour system upgrades in the middle of the night, but I think I can "migrate" to something more challenging, like my ever-expanding honey-do list."

The departure of experts like Bell opens opportunity for third parties to serve homesteaders. But knowledge drain has been on the community's list of issues for more than six years. That HP documents link includes a white paper from Mark Bixby, a former 3000 engineer who's now part of the development team at K-12 app company QSS. Bixby's April, 2003 paper, Is Your e3000 Environment Secure? still brims with valuable expertise. Even though the homesteading advice was written before HP stopped selling 3000s, the deck of more than 100 PowerPoint slides is full of good practices. Near the end, Bixby said that retiring expertise could pose security questions.

"Employees with MPE OS and local application skills may leave to seek a different career path," he wrote. "Will the employees who are left have sufficient skills to ensure good MPE and application security? Make sure critical knowledge is written down somewhere."

HP is still hosting the MPE knowledge on its servers, and the vendor is licensing the content to third parties. Unless a retirement path like the one Bell describes is the plan for apps at homesteading sites, you should marshal the critical, tribal knowledge of your apps as part of a sustainability practice.

TV news streams from the Tech Forum

The Connect conference that drew 2,700 attendees is long over, but some of the user group and HP messages from the HP Technology Forum & Expo live on, streamed from the Web. SDR News, a video interview service, gathered more than a dozen one-to-one interviews at the event. SDR was "invited media," according to Connect president Nina Buik.

The coverage includes a talk about the future of the Connect user group from its incoming president, Chris Koppe of Speedware. In 11 minutes of Q&A, Koppe talks about the efforts to raise the user group's visibility inside HP. There are also fundamentals about what Connect's mission is during a year when all user groups are working to remain relevant and vital resources.

The SDR coverage is interesting because it was recorded and streamed live at the conference -- so it's not as dressed up and controlled as the HP-created videos all over the Web. Koppe was one of only three people interviewed by SDR at the HPTF who were not HP employees. (There's also five minutes with the winner of a $10,000 drawing, but that probably qualifies as "human interest" instead of news.) Koppe takes his office in January for the user group and has been a board member or volunteer since 2005. He has brought the tribal knowledge of the HP 3000 user community to the group from his work on the Interex board of directors.

The 20 SDR videos also include a word from a company that began an HP 3000 emulator project, although that platform and the ongoing project aren't mentioned.

Koppe, who was a member of the Interex board when that user group folded four summers ago, talks a bit about the Connect business model. "We're non-profit and we run on a shoestring budget," he said. "Every dollar of what we collect goes to member services."

He also noted that vendors will get airtime to add to Connect's voice to HP user community. A Special Interest Group for vendors is in Connect's plans. The user group has great motivation for giving vendors a voice like the one Interex offered for two decades via SIG-Softvend. Speaking from a conference floor filled with vendor booths, Koppe said the Connect vendors "also end up being a funding source for our organization."

Other SDR interviews and video from the conference include keynotes from Intel and Brocade, a Microsoft roadmap talk, and a fascinating interview with Robert Boers, CEO of Stromasys. That company was once named SRI and started work on an HP 3000 emulator in 2004. We'll have more tomorrow about that subject, an issue that once dominated the advocacy of OpenMPE.

3000 tools still en route to release

In the middle of a summer where security patches seem to fly at the top of IT consciousness, tools and programs for the HP 3000 are still winging their way to a Web site near your browser.

Speedware licensed all of HP's available content for 3000s off the Jazz utility server earlier this year, as well as training programs for migration platform HP-UX. Those free training tools made a debut online this spring, but after a detour of a few months the Jazz utility programs will also be hosted on a Speedware Web site.

"I am probably halfway through what needs to be done for the Jazz [software]," reported Speedware's Webmaster Andre Dubreuil. "I figure by the end of this month everything should be up and available for download."

Some of the rescheduling came as a result of Speedware's new initiative to get more migration projects started before 2010. The vendor points to the end of HP's 3000 support as a good reason to launch a transition to a platform such as Windows or HP-UX.

Security is a more serious issue for those target platforms, judging by the release in recent weeks of patches and warnings. While the Twitter distributed denial of service (DDoS) issue is still hampering that microblogging service -- driven by Linux systems and used on hundreds of millions of Windows clients -- HP continues to roll out HP-UX security patches, including a new denial of service fix for Internet services.

The latest Unix environment patch for HP's business servers closes a security vulnerability with HP-UX running BIND. The vulnerability can be exploited remotely to create a denial of service. HP issued a security bulletin yesterday for patch HPSBUX02451. HP-UX versions B.11.11, B.11.23, B.11.31 running BIND v9.3.2 or BIND v9.2.0 are at risk.

The Twitter DDoS exploits have been traced to an attack on a blogger's site, according to chief security officer Max Kelly at Facebook, which has also been affected. Blogger and LiveJournal also experienced slowdowns, according a Facebook status update. "The attack that caused issues with accessing Facebook and other sites appears to have been directed at an individual, rather than at the sites themselves," the status report stated today.

Security hacks for the DDoS were directed through Facebook and Twitter users. A report in the UK's Guardian newspaper said that attack that disrupted the Twitter site and caused problems for Facebook and LiveJournal was aimed at a a 34-year-old economics lecturer who is an active critic of Moscow's politics in the Caucasus region. "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. A similar attack on the blogger last year crashed LiveJournal.

Can Google Go Where 3000s Went?

This week Google unveiled a campaign to bring small businesses under its cloud service. The effort is called Going Google, a subscription to a range of office applications run through the Google network and servers. Google wants $1,335 to set up 10 users with a package of apps which enable collaboration, video and hosting, as well as messaging. Yearly administration is another $3,300

Analysts say this push will crowd Microsoft, whose Office and Exchange apps now rule on workstations around the world. But the effort also recalls the HP 3000 enterprises of the 1980s: a full range of software such as HP Deskmanager for mail, HP Word, graphics and more, all driven by HP 3000 centralized servers. In time HP tried to push New Wave to bring PCs into the host application loop, a plan with feet of clay from its very first day. Where Going Google differs is in the administration. 3000 users had a local DP manager to call when problems cropped up. The solutions didn't always come immediately from their computer department. But the responsibility rested inside the organization.

In contrast, a Google customer will have to endure service outages as if they were an Act of God. No matter how big the service group, everyone can get hacked. This morning Twitter went offline completely for about two hours, victimized by a Distributed Denial of Service attack. The IT group at Twitter's HQ has had a very long day already, one that's not over since Twitter services are still spotty as of this afternoon.

This is the reality of the 2009 cloud: A broad reach that HP could only fantasize about in the 1980s, even while 50,000 of its employees connected via an HP Desk network. Jump forward a couple of decades and collaborate with anyone without building network infrastructure. Just remember to tell your management that working in the clouds means you risk running afoul of Internet demons.

No IT solution is without risk. Both homesteading and migrating customers hear about risks of making a transition -- either a move to dependence on new non-HP partners, or pushing IT apps to a new environment. You can prepare yourself for your own disaster recovery, or defense from DDoS. Or you can rely on Service Level Agreements that will be tested when problems arise.

A one-stop solution still isn't a part of Going Google. You won't find a Bill of Materials app in the lineup, just like MANMAN wasn't part of a HP-supplied Desk suite. In a best case MANMAN could be programmed to accept Deskmanager mail, using APIs for MANMAN, or FORTRAN inside MANMAN's code. The same kind of integration must be available from cloud apps like Google Docs, or whatever HP puts inside its cloud computing solution.

Maybe popular apps like Oracle's finance suite or SAP will find a place in the cloud. Or in a more probable solution, your in-house apps run someplace else, where an IT staff defends against DDoS and other surprises. But the more you have to customize your computing -- a good practice to enhance its value -- the more your staff remains tethered to the cloud.

A very small percentage of 3000 sites went all-HP with software, in part because customization was harder in 1989 than it is in 2009. Open source, full-disclosure APIs, source forges and public class libraries are all improvements over those old 3000 choices. IT experience and insight have not become antique skills, though. It's easy to see that a choice of an enterprise-replacement cloud solution will still require programmer savvy, as well as system analyst experience to communicate a company's business rules and requirements. You can outsource for most of that savvy and experience with any number of 3000-facile third parties.

HP keeps rolling Unix security patches

The 3000 community doesn't patch its systems often, but moving your operations to the HP-UX platform will trigger more updates. HP-UX is based on Unix System V, one of the most widely installed environments in the world after Windows and Linux. No environment is breach-proof, but a shift to HP-UX requires a closer watch on patches than in MPE/iX.

While many of these HP-UX patches are only recommended, some critical security holes have to be closed by a patch. HP's rolled out two of these over the last three weeks. One patch only applies to HP ServiceGuard, a product not included on every HP-UX system, but in wide use on mission-critical servers.

But a patch from July 21 identified an "arbitrary code execution" hole for XNTP, the standard time service for Unix systems. Secunia.com called the exploit and the patch highly critical in its advisory. Kerberos also got a critical security patch, HPSBUX02421, last week.

HP has a free program that administrators install on HP-UX servers that "simplifies patch and security bulletin management." Did the HP 3000 ever need such a utility? 3000s eventually received PatchMan to monitor patches of all kinds, though few of the patches were created to respond to security holes. But the server's environment isn't built from an industry standard such as Unix.

HP Software Assistant (SWA) "analyzes a system (and some types of depots) for patch warnings, critical defects, security bulletins, missing Quality Pack patch bundles, and user-specified patches and patch chains" for HP-UX. Many Unix systems include this kind of auto-scan for patches; the Mac OS looks for patches as often as daily, and downloads them (without installing).

Automated HP 3000 environment checking was at its zenith with HP Predictive Support. Like SWA, users needed to enable Predictive manually. It was created in an era when 3000s were only networked on private nets, so HP had to install Predictive modems to enable the checks. But Predictive didn't check for security breaches. A HP Support customer could have the high-failure parts of 3000s -- disks, tapes and memory -- scanned regularly for potential faults. It could also monitor available disk space.

As with HP's 3000 support, Predictive became a casualty of the vendor's exit from the 3000 market. The community got an October, 2006 notice that HP's labs were dropping sustaining engineering and connectivity support for Predictive. HP 9000s, OpenVMS, Linux and Windows systems replaced the functionality of Predictive with the Instant Support Enterprise Edition, starting in 2003. ISEE lasted until this June, when HP replaced it with HP Remote Support Pack and HP Insight Remote Support.

Security patches are free from HP, a vendor that's always watching for liability issues with its customers. HP Insight and Remote Support Pack are employed along with an HP support contract.

New disks refresh old HP 3000s

An upcoming feature for next month's print edition of the 3000 NewsWire will examine older HP 3000s still running today. (If you've got a '90s-vintage 3000 still running, I'd like to talk to you soon.) More than a few of the oldest of these systems are doing duty in software support labs. Whether a support or a production system, very 3000 needs ready replacements for disk drives, but the Series 9x7 3000s reach back to the middle 1990s. Disks running more than a decade are on borrowed time, so replacements need to be available.

The community has located a resource for 9x7 disk drives. The suppliers don't advertise these as HP 3000 disk drives. But the Seagate ST318416N is an 18GB drive you can purchase for about $200 online. The drives are listed as new, but they will slip into a 9x7 because the ST318416N is an accepted device on the IODFAULT list. (Paul Edwards tells us it's the IODFAULT.PUB.SYS list.)

We heard of one site that was buying a dozen of these drives as replacement parts to keep their 9x7s fitted with internal drives. But there's no reason you cannot skip past an internal drive and use external devices instead.

It bears a mention that buying 18GB for $200 is a lot more expensive than the 500GB drive you can purchase for $150 for your PC. But paying $50 extra for 482 GB less storage is still a bargain compared to replacing a server that isn't broken, but needs backup storage devices.

Seagate called these drives Barracudas. There's more of these fish in the sea in 2009 than we ever would have thought possible 15 years ago, when those 9x7s were new. We also had no idea back then that something called the Internet would make finding and buying these internal drives a simple matter of searching "Seagate ST318416N" in something called Google.

In what seems like another era, HP told customers that parts for HP 3000s would be costly and difficult to find, another reason to migrate. Hardware vendors such as Genisys or Bay Pointe Technology specialize in 3000 components and devices. And when a garden-variety disk vendor such as AllHDD can supply new internal devices that have passed HP's blessing -- because it's on the IOFDATA list -- keeping old 3000s useful seems cheaper and easier than HP imagined.

Questions, definitions expand broad scope of HP IT manager skills

HP 3000s work across a vast scope of IT expertise. The computer was sold in the 1980s and onward to replace steel filing cabinets, according to the late 3000 advocate Wirt Atmar. The 3000 also drives  business critical computing so complex that it needs an IT expert to integrate with an enterprise. On the other hand, the casual 3000 user benefits when they better understand the jargon of the system's operating environment.

Whether a customer needs help knowing what a "Gig" is, or would do well to know what CSLT stands for and how to use one, HP offers resources for both kinds of customers. The technical wizards who call IT a career might cringe at the simplicity of HP's "Most Baffling IT Terms," fundamental questions that every computer manager had better understand. On the other hand, the Glossary for MPE/iX 7.5 defines terms that would glaze over the eyes of an office manager who's just acquired 3000 responsibility -- and needs those definitions.

Both levels of resource are necessary for the 3000 community, since the computer was sold as a general-purpose computer solution for decades. Some low-tech everyday office workers have managed 3000s for all of that time. Some are now acquiring 3000 duties and could use that glossary to make their work easier. A few of the 3000 vets may have been out of the general computing loop and could make use of HP's baffling terms.

Those "baffling IT terms" paint with a broad brush aimed at novice computer managers. They include Blu-Ray as well as WEP, and while the former is understood by schoolkids, the latter is a security choice that's weak even by HP's own term definition. (More useful, but missing: A definition of WPA2, a secure choice to protect Wi-Fi.)

HP has produced a series of entertaining, low-tech video primers on technology practices, created for the novice manager using Windows to run a small business. The videos won't get into essential practices such as securing access on a Windows XP account on a PC. But at 12 minutes or so, they deliver more insight than an IT term list.

As for that Windows XP security, even the fundamentals can elude a 3000 manager who's an expert at the likes of lockwords but is faced with protecting a network of Windows PCs. Dave Powell answered such a question from Shawn Gordon, whose 3000 expertise is deep enough to develop 3000 tools.

"A friend has a Windows network with several main servers," Gordon asked, "and the problem seems to be these servers' IPs are exposed to the world at large through their Cisco router (which has selected ports open), and people can use terminal services to log in. There seems to be nothing other than a user ID and password required as long as that user is part of the remote access group, and everyone appears to have the Administrator password."

Powell, who's been a 3000 community contributor of command files for years, replied that shutting down all but crucial services is a good start for managing any computer system. "Part of my standard XP setup routine is to disable several services which various sources have called security risks. “Terminal services” is one of the ones I always disable. In XP, go to control-panel | administrative tools | services."

For the 3000 manager who's inherited administration of a system from a retired expert, securing the 3000 is less a matter of disabling services than understanding what MPE/iX offers. Even after 25 years, one of the best whitepapers on the subject is Eugene Volokh's Burn Before Reading, part of Vesoft's Thoughts and Discourses on HP3000 Software. The paper is online at the Adager technical papers Web site.

Vendors supply database aids for migration

Migrating HP 3000 shops often look for a new database as part of their projects. A customer who's chosen an application over any other consideration, or a reseller as the key element, cares much less about a database. But in-house applications get moved to new databases. Which one to choose sometimes depends on experience and support, from out of house.

Marxmeier Software is the leading choice for companies who want a database that adapts to IMAGE designs. The company's Eloquence has been praised for years. "Eloquence is one of the best products on the market," said 3000 and Unix consultant Craig Lalley of EchoTech. On this spring's release of Version 8.0, Lalley said "So far, I am very impressed, as usual."

But some companies migrating from 3000s want an open source solution for a replacement. Sometimes these companies seek a vendor-neutral strategy. Duane Percox, one of the founders of K-12 app vendor QSS, said his company sought out open source to replace 3000 apps because HP has made the last decision that will impact QSS like HP did when it dropped the 3000.

PostgreSQL, called Postgres by much of the developer community, has gotten high marks as an IMAGE alternative at QSS. But even though Postgres is open source, vendors have emerged to give the database commercial-grade support and consulting. Like RedHat is to Linux, Enterprise DB is to Postgres. Starting with open source code for the database, EnterpriseDB is pushing Postgres into commercial-class caliber.

3000 customers want a company like Marxmeier or EnterpriseDB to be partners when moving in-house applications. Marxmeier even does strong business with third party app suppliers who've moved products to Unix and Windows. Summit Information Technologies credit union app suite is one great example.

EnterpriseDB touts a product it calls Postgres Plus Advanced Server, the company’s flagship relational database product based on PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB includes new technology in the Server that enables companies to move more Oracle applications more easily. While that's not much help to the migrating HP 3000 customer, the company promises that a new “Infinite Cache provides massive scalability at low cost by leveraging commodity hardware and eliminating custom programming."

Commodity hardware is at the heart of many a 3000 migration, as customers turn to racks of Windows servers and leverage the in-house expertise in the Microsoft environment. Perhaps of most value to 3000 customers looking at migration today is EnterpriseDB's comparison of Postgres and MySQL, the other open source database. In a deft move, Oracle acquired ownership of MySQL this spring when it purchased Sun Microsystems. Deciding which open source DB to evaluate gets simpler with such Web resources.

There's a Web-based seminar at the EnterpriseDB site comparing the two open source databases. Bill Pillow of the company said they often come in contact with MySQL customers "when they've hit the wall with MySQL." He called MySQL record-bound and better as a read-only choice for a database. Commercial companies are building enterprise-grade foundations from open source by now. But the essential element remains a vendor who's responsible for software in business-critical environments. Finding support and consultation is a hidden but critical cost in using open source solutions.

Postgres still has a long way to travel to become an integrated partner with 3000 tools such as those from Robelle, Speedware, Minisoft and many more. Eloquence counts all those alliances, but open source still appeals on its technical merits and cost of acquisition. Still, third party databases have been more popular with 3000 migrators in the QSS customer base. "We have done a bunch of PostgreSQL," Percox said, "and find it to be a wonderful database, but our customers are choosing SQL Server at a rate of about 80/20 over PostgreSQL." Vendor support continues to matter.

Make copies of crucial 3000 tapes

HP provided a utility in MPE/iX for copying HP's factory-generated System Load Tapes (SLTs), but that utility is falling into neglect. In an era when the 3000 lab at HP has been closed, the tool has fallen even farther away from reliability. This essential program to copy a 3000 boot tape isn't likely to get any more HP attention.

Since copying SLTs is a significant maintenance requirement for 3000 administrators, a long-term solution for the copying is essential to homesteaders. Allegro Consultants offers X-OVER to do the job. What's more, if a homesteading site has a single-reel SLT, Allegro's got a free tool to accomplish that kind of copy.

"Our X-OVER product can handle multi-reel SLT input tapes," Allegro VP Stan Sieler reported online, "although it looks like it doesn’t handle multi-reel SLT output tapes. By 'multi-reel' I mean an SLT where the SLT section -- not the optional STORE section -- crosses a reel boundary. This would normally be seen only on 9-track tapes. X-Over handles multi-reel STORE tapes, or STORE sections of SLT/STORE combo tapes."

The free Allegro tool is TAPECOPY, which when run with the "TT" option will copy an SLT that fits on a single reel. This tool will warns if it sees any records that might be too large for it to handle.

SLTCOPY was designed by HP in a different storage era. SLTCOPY doesn't have reel-switch logic, for input or output. SLTCOPY is also missing large record support, too, though it's a rare SLT which uses large records.

But the SLT is a significant element in maintaining a legitimate HP 3000. HP supplied these System Load Tapes as one of the two minimum requirements for complete system software -- at least when the system software was shipped on tape media and not pre-loaded. The SLT contains the OS base to perform basic functions, including booting the 3000, configuring its disks, and restoring files.

How important is the SLT? Essential enough to have multiple copies onsite, so a midnight search for the SLT is a short one. 3000 experts such as Paul Edwards who spoke at user group conferences, and Mike Hornsby of Beechglen, have preached the details of recovery management. Hornsby said "It is very common for SLTs to play hide and seek. It is not at all amusing to play this game at 2:30 am. It is a good idea to have multiple SLT copies -- one stored in a safe place and another physically attached to the system in a folder/envelope that also contains a SYSGEN, or better yet a SYSINFO configuration listing."

X-Over does a lot more than copy SLTs. It can convert tape sets from one format to another, make duplicate copies of backups, even tape a multi-tape backup on older media and copy it to a single DDS tape. It's good to know that the fundamentals of 3000 management will be maintained in the third party community even after HP ends its 3000 support.

Poke into clouds with HP Labs paper

HP Tech Forum attendees were doused with cloud computing references this year. There's a certain level of buzz that might compel an IT manager or 3000 owner to know answers to basic cloud questions when the queries surface from top management. Within the rich confines of HP Labs Technical Reports, a good Cloud 101 primer is available for download.

This paper released this year is titled Outsourcing Business to Cloud Computing Services: Opportunities and Challenges. The writing in this PDF document is as straightforward as the title; the paper is only 17 pages long and explains differences between Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Database as a Service, and Software as a Service.

As it turns out, the paper's only table shows that only Software as a Service (SaaS) has any direct use for managers, business owners or business users. The PaaS, IaaS and DaaS are tools for the IT administrator or developer. However, the HP technical writers assert that the time is near for computer owners to be able to access most of their processing needs from the clouds.

Advances in service oriented architecture (SOA) have brought us close to the once-imaginary vision of establishing and running a virtual business, a business in which most or all of its business functions are outsourced to online services.

Cloud computing shares a common goal with the old concept of timesharing: A computing resource managed by a third party that provides storage, processing and administration for a fee. In exchange, the owners of a business or enterprise pursue their business, instead of IT planning and investments.

HP submitted its white paper to the Special Issue on Cloud Computing published this year by IEEE Internet Computing. The paper does include a reference in its back matter to a more promotional HP document about the cloud. But reading what HP Labs has written about cloud computing looks like its hype caliber has been dialed back to reasonable discourse.

Back in the days when timesharing was a common business solution, HP Labs papers came out once a quarter in the Hewlett-Packard Journal. You waited up to three months to receive them, got paper that had to be copied to be shared, and waited for a year-end index issue. Now you can read the history of the 479 issues of the printed Journal from HP Labs Web site, including the issue that unveiled breakthrough compiler technology for HP's PA-RISC systems. The latest Labs papers are online right away, just like so many seems other resources in our modern age. While this Labs research is usually inappropriate for briefings with non-technical management, technologists in the 3000 community can find clear-eyed studies of what's being buzzed about in conferences and airliner cabins.

Unix conversions can include forms

Most migrations present a wide array of tasks and challenges, from finding a new facility for job handling to the more mundane replacement of 3000 forms. A few ideas have surfaced on the 3000 newsgroup to replace HP 3000-specialized forms solutions such as Fantasia.

While Fantasia does have a product which moves the forms solution to Unix, there's also a cross-platform option that's been proven at Minisoft. This vendor of printing, middleware and connectivity solutions has served the 3000 community for more than two decades. Its lineup includes eFORMz, a forms and document management suite written in Java that runs on the HP 3000, HP 9000, Unix, Linux, and Windows. The eFORMz solution recently added RTF document support in its 7.0 version.

"This is a product that many Fantasia users have migrated to over the years," said Minisoft founder Doug Greenup. The 3000 community has also used Minisoft's ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC middleware products that support IMAGE, Eloqence and Oracle.

Open source software can provide roll-your-own functionality for forms conversions, too. Charles Finley of Transformix suggests that Adobe PDF-oriented open source products can do this. "It is not horribly difficult or expensive for someone with Unix and scripting skills," Finley said. "However, it might prove to be a challenge for a do-it-yourselfer."

The idea is to convert the forms you are going to merge with to PDF, and then convert your HP 3000 print output to PDF and merge the two. The idea is to use one of the Unix open source products that translate from text to postscript (i.e. A2ps, enscript, etc.) -- and then convert from Postscript to PDF using something like ps2pdf. Finally, you use any one of a number of PDF merge tools to do the merge. All of this is assembled together in a [Unix] script and automated.

34 summers ago, HP first Communicated

Working in the 3000 community to tell stories gets to be a richer job every year. People I've known since I was a young reporter sometimes pass on relics from the 3000's past. Last month I got such a gift from Steve Hammond, a 3000 veteran who's moved on with his employer to other systems but pursues history as his avocation. A modest white envelope that he gave me contained a piece of history: HP's first Communicator.

The document was HP's first shot into an open sky of communications to HP 3000 users of 1975. June of that year might have been the first summer that HP wanted to share updates about the HP 3000, since the computer had passed through the end of '74 and gotten into summer of '75 with consistent reports of reliability. Issue 1 of the Computer Systems Communicator included a section on the HP 2000 systems as well as the HP 9600 Measurement and Control systems. HP considered the three computers a complete solution to data processing needs of the middle '70s.

Only one of these computer systems has survived into this century, and HP identifies some of the credit for the 3000's longevity in this Communicator's contents: user groups, the first Communicator's theme. A HP 3000 user group was introduced with a board of directors and a mandate for meetings: "The meetings, open to all group members, afford an excellent forum for the exchange new techniques and ideas."

This Communicator also advised 3000 users about "Steps to Produce a Core Dump Tape" as well as an update to a bedrock program still used by every HP 3000 database today, FCOPY.

At 32 loose-leaf pages, the June 15, 1975 Communicator is a fledgling document. There was a good reason that the new HP 3000 Users Group met four times over 1974-75. 3000 technology was quick to change on this new HP business computer, and printed advice couldn't cover what a good talk could in person. Through 1975, two meetings were held in Palo Alto and one each in Chicago and Miami.

HP was also happy to report success for a customer who'd completed an HP 3000 internals course in this issue. "ESL in Sunnyvale, California is involved with various government agencies who as customers demand highly sophisticated applications, some of which are photographic image processing and display and land usage plottage." ESL was writing its own IO drivers and "saw a need for greater understanding of the internal activities of MPE." HP included a contact if customers wanted similar training.

To this day the Communicator continues to hold the internal advice from HP's labs to its more ardent 3000 homesteaders. HP is still making these documents available to the world from its docs.hp.com Web pages. The history there goes back more than 21 summers ago, to the Communicator issue that HP first sent out in 1988 with its groundbreaking PA-RISC MPE/XL 1.0 systems.

The final Communicator, issued one summer ago for MPE/iX 7.5 PowerPatch 5, features a pair of technical articles on IO options that might still be new to 3000 owners. Jim Hawkins, one of the last members of HP's 3000 labs, wrote pieces on High Availability FailOver/iX for FiberChannel Disk Arrays and Limited Support for Ultrium Tape on MPE/iX. A listing of beta test patches, and MPE support details for those arrays aren't available on an HP Web site any longer. (The 3000 community has several experts who can guide customers through installing the high-end arrays; Craig Lalley of EchoTech is the first who comes to mind.) Client Systems has posted a selection of HP labs whitepapers on its rehosted Jazz Web site.

Practice independence in your community

Here in the US we're observing our Independence Day this weekend, a celebration that echoes my hopes of independence for HP 3000 community members. Those who are homesteading on the system beyond HP's schedule have already chosen an independent path. They depend on new partners for support. Some community members have chosen the independence of Linux and open source, too, to supplement their 3000 computing power.

I also believe that independence is essential to those members staying with HP. Those companies migrating need to speak out freely about their experiences. As a journalist for almost 30 years, I've seen a decline in the independence of speaking on the record. I'd love to start a revolution in that regard and roll back the calendar, but anonymous sources have become a bulwark in reporting. The journalism community represented at the Washington, DC Newseum — a fine stop for any citizen-tourist in that town — has grave doubts about anonymous sources. We reporters trade credibility for trust when we need to use these sources.

I'd use fewer of these with more customers going on the record. Public meetings, open to both users and the press, are becoming rare indeed. It's up to 3000 community members to speak out online, where the speaker has more control of what's being reported.

In fact, the demise of public meetings was one factor in passing up the HP Technology Forum & Expo this year. This is first year since 1985 that I haven't attended a national-level HP user conference. After 24 annual events in a row, it seemed that things have changed between HP and the press. Last year I complained about the frustration of incomplete press access at HPTF. Things have shifted in HP's press approach, which makes the Internet and blogs the reasonable alternative to hearing community members' voices.

There's been a bit of good change, like hearing HP talk live to the analysts about quarterly reports via the Internet. But when Computerworld is standing outside a meeting door alongside the 3000 NewsWire, then HPTF starts to look like a restricted event. The user forums were ideal for a journalist who wants in-person connections with new sources. Users voicing opinions and telling stories about their customer experience is the meat of a conference. I understand how that won't serve HP as well as it did in the 80s or even the 90s. Sometimes you just have to accept changes.

As a community member you don't have to accept a less independent strategy. HP does operate a few forums online where customers can share opinion and experience. But the filtering is profound these days, probably reflecting the whole spin dance companies do with the media. You control your statements if you can speak out in places like Twitter, Linked In and Facebook (all of which have 3000-related followings and groups), as well as the Connect user group's online MPE forum. We'll be hearing more about that group in awhile, according to Connect board director Chris Koppe.

Until then and beyond, I hope you'll share your independent statements with your community and me here at the NewsWire. Enjoy and exercise your independence as a citizen, community member, or both.

Thanks for reading for four years

This week I'm grateful for four years of your attention on our blog. In June of 2005 I took the first steps into the media that was called Weblogs at the time, and your support of us has kept the news business lively, fun and a-pace of the action in 21st Century computing.

Fun comes most obviously on April 1, when journalists follow the tradition of the faux news story. We talked about a Treeware Project, and a development mission to rewrite MPE/iX as social networking software. On our first two blog Aprils the Fool's Day fell on a weekend, so we had to set the comedy aside. We've also reported on a $7 HP 3000, which was no joke, and how HP blew up Unix and NonStop servers with C4 to prove how good they were.

There's also been fun in reporting the news people would rather not have made public. It usually requires public sources, people who are willing to take a chance on speaking up. The stand-up, on-the-record sources have become tougher to find over the 25 years I've written about the HP computer environment. The trend might seem safer for those who don't speak up. But it puts everybody who needs adaptation and new ideas at risk.

Perhaps there will be a renaissance in relationships between software vendors and their customers. But here, heading into our fifth year of reporting weekdays on the blog, it seems the suppliers of technology are spooking too many customers into caution -- when those customers need action and honesty from the vendors about their options. It's baffling that a company will support a vendor with cash in this rough economy, than cringe at the vendor's displeasure should the truth ever be told in an unfavorable light.

How you will ever ensure a productive relationship with a vendor which cashes checks and tells you to keep quiet, well, I don't know. It would be untoward to call it blackmail, but the integrity of such an arrangement is a hoary mess. What's the redress for an unhappy customer? The ancients back in the 20th Century used to run companies with complaint departments. Now if you buy Oracle you're barred from reporting on its performance, right in the contract.

As a more local example, spreading word that a 3000 installation can't be PCI DSS compliant doesn't tell the whole truth, or even a decent share of it. That Ecometry continues to do this, in the face of third-party solutions to the contrary, makes it plain who the company is working for. That would be its shareholders and officers, rather than the customers who mail support checks every month.

What's more, a user group that meets in private, and keeps its discussion under wraps, doesn't seem to be working for any 3000 homesteaders who use Ecometry. It certainly isn't of much use to anyone who's outside the meeting room until somebody goes public. Over my quarter-century, and four years of blogging, I've learned that going offline to resolve an issue can be that trap-door you see in the James Bond movies. You watch and say,"Don't stand there," but people still step onto the "give me your business card so we can discuss this" chute.

Happily, there are still independent and intelligent IT pros who see the benefit of keeping discussions out in the open. Blogs push us journalists into new reporting processes, because we don't have to wait for ink and paper to dry and mail anymore. The new beta-culture makes it plain that the myth of journalism's perfection is just that, a fantasy. Newspaper people—and I started as one almost 30 years ago—see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers—and every journalist blogs today—see posts as part of the process of learning.

These new practices help me get more information out there faster than the old days of envelopes and staples and weeks of knowing but being unable to tell. Everyone whose help I've received for a story should know that a "off-the-record" or background-only request is an automatic yes, unless I have to say no or abandon the story. But there's a story to tell every Monday through Friday here, a joy and sometimes a challenge. Thanks for keeping your eyes on us and our new news culture since 2005.

HP educates on virtual servers today

The HP user group Connect gave us notice late yesterday that HP will offer instruction in an hour-long Webcast today. Virtual servers offer a potential upgrade for HP 3000 sites who are migrating, but the concepts differ from 3000 fundamental architecture. Andy Schneider of HP will talk at 2:30 PM CDT (19:30 Central Europe time) on Mission Critical Virtualization Solutions with HP Integrity Blades and HP Virtual Server Environment.

Registration for this free GoToWebinar is open online at the Go To Meeting Web site. Schneider, who's with HP's Software Virtualization team in the Enterprise Storage and Servers unit, will show the latest deliverables for HP Integrity Blade server environments,"including processing capabilities, network/storage interconnect technologies, and their interaction with HP Virtual Connect capabilities." This Virtual Server Environment (VSE) is one driver toward migrating to the HP-UX environment.

Promising an insight on "unprecedented business outcomes," the Webcast page says Schneider will talk about the processor and networking upgrades in the Integrity Blade line.

Leveraging on these recent offerings, infrastructure management enhancements in the area VSE’s support of logical servers will be discussed, including expanded capacity planning functions with HP Capacity Advisor, and the related integration with the virtualization and high availability solutions that are integral to the HP VSE environment

HP's Unix rebuffs Java security exploit

A new critical patch for the HP-UX operating environment — a key element in many HP 3000 transition plans — has closed the door on the latest security hack.

Java can be forced to execute rogue code on HP's Unix, as well as many other flavors of the OS from other vendors. Versions B.11.11, B.11.23, B.11.31 of HP-UX are affected, running the Java Runtime Engine 6.0.03 or earlier, or RTE 1.4.2.22 or earlier.

The problem's details, scant as they are, are on the HP IT Response Center Web site page dedicated to the security breach. (You'll need a password and user handle to log in. These are free.) The patch is HPSBUX02429; the service number is SSRT090058.

HP says "you could be at risk of a serious recoverable error if action is not taken." The HP 3000 version of Java doesn't use these more recent runtime engines. But Java on the 3000 isn't a fully functional tool, either.

Not all vendors have written a patch to close Java's security holes under Unix. One back door remains open for Apple systems, even after six months of notice about the breach. Apple's OS X is still missing a patch as of this week, much to the dismay of system admins. One developer has actually published a how-to, proof-of-concept exploiting this breach, to nudge along the Apple patch.

The secured versions of Java for HP-UX are available at HP's Java Web site.

HP-UX training arrives free today only

Connect gives a taste of the HP Unix content from the HP Technology Forum & Expo today, a Webcast launching at 1 PM CDT. The conference begins in earnest four weeks from today in Las Vegas, where an expo floor has filled three more open booths since we last checked 10 days ago.

Today's free content is presented by longtime HP-UX expert Bill Hassell. This IT pro has been a fixture on HP user group agendas for more than two decades. I enjoyed sampling a seminar on HP-UX secrets and tips at the 2007 Greater Houston Regional User Group conference. Well worth the time; even those with everyday Unix experience could be seen taking notes and nodding their heads.

Attendance is free for today's "Sneak Peek." Register online with Connect.

In a glitch this morning, the Citrix meeting registration page is bouncing off to an error 404 Web page right after registration. You can rely on the confirmation e-mail for your unique Web address to attend.

Connect says that Hassell, who worked for HP many years ago before founding his own consulting company, will provide admin tips today in the Sneak Peak.

Hassell will show some common system administrator tasks with a twist to get things done faster. There will be some command line and scripting techniques to manage multiple systems as well as providing automated notifications. There will be tips on scanning logs and creating automated notifications. Find out why 777 and -9 are the sysadmin's enemy and how to write good bootup start/stop scripts.

Google returns to a sound database design

This week we heard about Google's App Engine from ScreenJet's founder Alan Yeo. The free tool in Google Code "is sort of like a distributed computing environment that anyone can use," Yeo said when he called a few days back. "You can create Web applications and use Web-based datastores." Datastores for Google's App Engine use an SQL-like syntax, GQL. "See what database this reminds you of," Yeo asks.

GQL intentionally does not support the Join statement, because it is seen to be inefficient when queries span more than one machine. Instead, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships can be accomplished using ReferenceProperty(). This shared-nothing approach allows disks to fail without the system failing.

The where clause of select statements can perform >, >=, <, <= operations on one column only. Therefore, only simple where clauses can be constructed. Switching from a relational database to the Datastore requires a paradigm shift for developers when modeling their data.

"I think Google has just re-invented IMAGE," Yeo said.

Google's Web-based guide to the app solution goes on to explain that the Datastore is not relational in the traditional SQL sense, like with DB2, SQL Server or MySQL. "What they've written is almost IMAGE," Yeo said. "You've got detail datasets you can access on a key with a bunch of operators. You can can only access one dataset at a time from the keys. And they've done it for mass volume efficiency."

Most 3000 developers take mass volume efficiency of IMAGE as an article of faith. The efficiency of IMAGE lets nearly-antique processors like PA-RISC 2.0 run even with the latest Itanium chips, given the right database design.

The App Engine datastore is not like a traditional relational database. Data objects, or "entities," have a kind and a set of properties. Queries can retrieve entities of a given kind filtered and sorted by the values of the properties. Property values can be of any of the supported property value types.

"Looks like it's time to dust of those IMAGE skills and get an instant head start on those other developers, who are going to have to learn about network databases from scratch," Yeo told us. "Now if HP had some foresight they could have been sitting on a database structure that could become the backbone data storage model for the Internet."

Secure transfers come out of open shell

The Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) is a suite of transfer solutions that's in a transition position for the HP 3000. Enough work has been completed to bring this software into use under MPE/iX.

Donna Hofmeister, an OpenMPE director, has reported that

When Jeff Vance was at HP, he wrote a FTP script that used the Posix program ‘crypt’ to encrypt/decrypt files leaving an MPE system. If the destination system was also MPE, the file would be automatically decrypted upon delivery.

An expert in open source solutions that run on the 3000 says that SCP clients already have logged work on HP 3000s. Server-side SCP components are still in the future, though, for MPE/iX.

Hofmeister added, "I wrote a very simple decryption shell script for Unix/Linux. If someone had a lot of time on their hands and had intimate knowledge of Unix/Linux porting, there’s a remote possibility, I think, of moving this to the 3000. If all that you're looking for is 'push' (from MPE/iX) functionality, sftpput should work for you."

Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies explained the biggest challenge at the moment is finding OpenSSH download sources, since HP pulled the plug on the Invent3k Web server.

SCP (and sftp) clients are available for MPE/iX and work fine on version 7.5. You can contact me if you’d like to discuss how to get a copy of your own. I’ve had extensive experience with the sftp client, and some with the scp client. Both work remarkably well, although there are some ‘quirks’ it helps to  be aware of. I’d be happy to discuss those too.

The limitation here is that while files can be put to or retrived from other systems, since only the  client is available, the 3000 must originate the transaction. This can make for some process redesigns if your existing applications are used to your 3000 being the ‘server’.  And no, jinetd doesn’t need to be running for SCP or sftp to  work.

There is a port (although technically not complete) of what is by now a fairly old but still workable version of OpenSSH to MPE/iX. It was done by Ken Hirsh, which he had gratiously made available to the 3000 community via his Invent3k account. Unfortunately, the ‘Invent3k’ community development server that HP had made available some years ago is, like Jazz, no longer online. [OpenMPE has plans to rehost the Invent3k programs.]

I don’t recall what version of MPE was used, but I’ve used the ported software successfully on 7.0 and 7.5.  I suspect it’ll work on 6.0 or later, but as yet haven’t tested it myself. His port included the ‘ssh’ command line client, but it had very limited functionality due to technical issues.

It also included the client components sftp and scp, as well as an ‘entropy’  (random number) generator written in Perl. This last piece is necessary because the ‘random’ number functions under MPE/iX aren’t very random. At  least, not as far as serious cryptography is concerned. This Perl script (modified by Ken to run on MPE) was originally written by others to get around not having a kernel-based entropy source for their systems either. Poor quality random number generation is not just a MPE/iX issue.

The ‘server’ components (sshd, sftpd, and scpd) were never ported for reasons that Ken could possibly explain. It might have been something as simple as he didn’t need them. From my perspective I’m thankful that Ken did the port in the first place.

I have installed his OpenSSH port many times, and even tightly integrated it  with legacy applications. Sftp is still in use many times a day with those  applications, and since first installed several years go has safely and securely transferred terabytes of data, with no clear end-date for this application’s life.

I did a presentation on this at the 2008 GHRUG conference. Look at the bottom of the ‘Links & Other Resources’ page at my Web site.

I’m currently in the process of adding even more use of sftp and scp to replace standard FTP in this client’s applications, at the insistence of their PCI  auditors -- and so will have more stories to share.

Paper clip enables resets for disks

The HP 3000 was designed for satisfactory remote access, but there are times when the system hardware needs to be in front of you. Such was the case for a system analyst who was adding a disk drive recently to a A-Class HP 3000.

Central to this process is the 3000's Guardian Service Processor (GSP). This portion of the A-Class and N-Class Multifunction IO card gives system managers basic console operations to control the hardware before MPE/iX is booted, as well as providing connectivity to manage the system. Functions supported by the GSP include displaying self-test chassis codes, executing boot commands, and determining installed hardware. (You can also read it as a speedometer for how fact your system is executing.)

The GSP was the answer when Larry Simonsen asked

I need to configure some additional disk drives and I believe reboot the server. The GSP is connected to a IP switch and I have the IP address for it, but it is not responding. I believe I need to enable it from the console. Can this be done from the soft console, using a PC as the console with a console # command?

A paper clip will reset the GSP and enable access, says EchoTech's Craig Lalley.

Lalley added that a GSP reset is an annual maintenance step for him.

Look on the back of the CPU and you will see a small hole labeled GSP RESET.  You need your favorite techie paper clip. Just insert the paper clip, and you will feel it depress. It takes about a minute to reset. Don't worry, it only reboots the GSP, and will not affect the HP 3000.

I find it is necessary to reset the GSP about once a year.  It seems to correlate to when you really need to get access, and you can't get physical access to the box. Good old Murphy's law.

Resource 3000's Stan Sieler (one of the Allegro Consultants) has a fine white paper online about MPE/iX system failure and hang recovery that includes GSP tips.

HP's documentation on resetting the GSP for the 900 Series 3000s, remotely through commands, is still online at the HP Web site.

HP pushes blades with solution blocks

Hewlett-Packard enjoys a leading position in blade server market share. The company's margin is a key element in the message that bladed servers are the vendor's new heartland for IT enterprise solutions. Both Windows and HP-UX can be deployed on blades. The former represents the bigger part of HP's blade share, so the latter was the topic for a recent Webcast hosted by the Connect user group.

Connect has posted the slides for the Webcast, a 60-page deck that might have been difficult to finish during the one hour time slot. One at the end stood out as a new offering, packaged like old 3000 products. HP calls these Solution Blocks, "hassle-free ordering, configuring and customizing of multiple applications. Starting with... HP-UX 11i on an HP platform provides a foundation for adding the required server, storage and tape backup blades to complete your infrastructure."

Solution Blocks are packed and deployed by HP's application resellers, so the business model aligns with the part of the HP 3000 customer base that purchased turnkey solutions, like Summit's Spectrum credit union app. HP's Webcast stressed that Solution Blocks reduce risk while optimizing deployment. Mitigating risk is high on the typical management list when a 3000 shop chooses to migrate.

There's the risk in remaining on the 3000, mostly the reality of declining community resources. But migrating also poses risks. A Washington State college consortium is regrouping this year after a $14 million project bottomed out. A Solution Block might not have helped there, but the point is to simplify any deployment.

HP and Connect didn't position the HP-UX blade server Webcast as a migration message. But the 3000 community is evaluating HP's Unix blades as a transition target. For the mid-sized customer with lean Unix skills, Solution Blocks might help. HP has the blocks organized by enterprise-size solutions and those targeted at mid-size companies. As an example, the SAP Business All-in-One is offered to mid-size firms with what HP calls "overbuilt" hardware.

The HP  BladeSystem for SAP Business All-in-One (AiO) Solution  Block running on HP Integrity server blades and the  HP-UX 11i operating environment. With the highly reliable HP BladeSystem infrastructure,  we’ve overbuilt the enclosure to set new standards of  readiness and certainty. It can accommodate 10 cooling  fans, six power supplies, four pairs of switches, and IO bandwidth of 5 terabytes—so your  business’ mission won’t stop.

Solution Blocks will probably be on the list of offerings from any reseller who's packaging HP's Unix along with applications. Unix has been a roll-your-own, highly customized solution for a long time. The blocks might make a Unix migration less complex.

Keep 3000-Mac emulation up to date

Macs aren't in wide use as HP 3000 clients, but the popular publishing and Web design computers do work for a number of 3000 community sites. One such is the US Cat Fancier's Association (CFA), where manager Connie Sellito needs an emulation program built for the Mac's modern-day OS X.

We do not have the  option of moving the Mac applications to a PC -- our publications (Web site and printed materials) department is firmly entrenched in the Mac camp. Makes for an interesting day!

The most straightforward solution comes from Minisoft. Its MS92 software, a longtime competitive solution to WRQ's Reflection, is designed and maintained for Macintoshes. Sellito's says that MS92 "is what we're using on the newer Macs. Excellent product."

But Reflection's scripting is entrenched at CFA. The emulator long ago lost its development team, in the same way that the WRQ brand name has disappeared into its new owner, Attachmate.

WRQ was once the largest supplier of HP 3000-related software, if you counted individual licenses on PCs. The company was acquired by Attachmate in 2005. Reflection lives on in a Windows version. The company also pointed to a Web-based solution that requires an intermediate server.

Melissa Liton, a PR rep for Attachmate, reports that "Reflection for HP is a Windows only product. However, Attachmate’s Reflection for the Web product — a Java-based “thin-client” that runs in the browser — does support Mac and is a great HP emulator."

The diagram at left shows the configuration needed to run Reflection for the Web. Adager's Alfredo Rego, one of the 3000+Mac advocates in the community, has also noted that running Reflection for HP is possible inside an emulator such as VMWare or Parallels. He's tested the latter, which recently proved to be more secured against a Windows malware exploit than its competitor. (That's right: Macs could get hit by a Windows virus with older versions of VMWare.)

No matter how you solve for giving Macs 3000 terminal access with Reflection, an in-between step adds complexity. When WRQ dropped Mac support late in the 1990s, the Mac was a niche solution in IT. Times have changed: A recent study showed that 68 percent of companies surveyed plan to add Macs to their IT mix. Minisoft has hung on long enough to see the world expand.

HP serves up Integrity blade broadcast

Hewlett-Packard will promote the virtualization features of its bladed Integrity HP-UX servers in a Webcast tomorrow (April 23). The broadcast begins at 11 AM CDT (1600 GMT), led by HP's Tom Vaden, who works on HP-UX architecture.

Registration for the Webcast is available at Gotomeeting.com Web site. You won't need anything special to access the Webcast other than a recent Windows or Mac OS version. A VOIP option is available for audio in addition to a standard phone dial-in number.

HP says the training broadcast — if you consider its hardware-software presentations training — will also cover power, cooling and management features of using blades with HP's Unix.

During this presentation, we will examine how HP-UX delivers its mission critical value proposition in bladed configurations. It will explain how the marriage of HP-UX and Integrity Server Blades enhance the core areas of the Adaptive Infrastructure especially for mission critical applications. The presentation will pay particular attention to the virtualization, power and cooling, and management advantages of HP-UX in a bladed environment.

Open source sites losing free resource

One of the few Web sites hosting genuine freeware for the HP 3000 removed its open source software this spring. After discussion with Speedware's product manager Nicolas Fortin, Mark Bixby decided to remove the copies of programs such as the Apache Web server that he'd ported to the 3000. Bixby, who also worked on HP 3000 Internet and networking software at HP, said that neither Speedware or HP asked him to thin out his versions of the open source software.

The thinning out was of my own accord. Mostly I pruned away everything that was either on Jazz or in the 3000's FOS. I did this cleanup after Nick Fortin contacted me about their takeover of the Jazz content. I felt it was confusing for me to still be providing outdated/duplicate versions of stuff. So the conspiracy theories can put be away. There was absolutely zero HP involvement in this decision.

Speedware's Fortin said he e-mailed Bixby "to ask if he was interested in having us host some of his files, as a backup to his own site, or even just point a link to his site. I never would have asked him to remove his content; that, surprisingly, was his suggestion."

Removing the open source software is only an issue for anyone in the 3000 community who wants unrestricted use of it. The programs on bixby.org were not controlled by the HP rehosting legal agreement which regulates access to such software. Bixby created and released his ports under the industry's GNU Public License (GPL), which permit alteration, updates and unrestricted redistribution.

These 3000 open source programs are coming online this spring at Speedware's new 3000 software resource site, and are already hosted at former HP 3000 distributor Client Systems. A 3,000-word HP End User License Agreement has been applied to all the Jazz software being re-hosted, including the open source programs. One open source expert has doubts the HP agreement is in line with GPL freeware licenses.

Brian Edminster, an expert on open source solutions for HP 3000s, has been working on an open source repository, free to the 3000 community. Edminster took note of the removals on Bixby's site and said the HP license might violate public license terms — but only a lawyer could be sure.

I'm of the opinion that HP may be in violation of the license agreements covering the Free/Open Source (F/OSS) packages that are part of the Jazz collection. In order to be absolutely sure, I'll have to verify the license under which each was originally written. Then I'll likely have to engage the services of one or more Intellectual Property lawyers that have done F/OSS work before. Unfortunately, there's enough confusion  - and this is a new enough area of the law - that it's as easy to get two differing answers to the same question about F/OSS as it is to get differing answers to tax questions, even when posed to the IRS!

Considering that the 3000 community is made up of companies with legal departments, the dense HP agreement applied to open source could have a chilling effect on how much the software might be used. Edminster said it appears to his eye that HP may be countermanding the redistribution rights of the software.

Early in that [HP license] is a restriction specifying that anything you use from the collection is 'only for your own use, no further redistribution is allowed'. That clause, when applied to the source-code of the F/OSS content, would be in direct violation of the 'free and unencumbered source code' clause in all F/OSS agreements that I'm aware of.

But while HP had no hand in Bixby's decision, the result is that HP's agreement now covers even more of the 3000 open source spectrum. Speeware, for its part, had to accept the HP license terms in order to be able to rehost other software from Jazz such as HP-written free programs. The EULA covers everything, however, with an "Ancillary Software" provision for public freeware. Of this, Edminster said

In the sections referencing the open source content, there might be exceptions noted in the fine print that my glazed-over eyes missed. That's part of the reason for having a legal professional look at it before even considering taking HP to task.

Free Jazz utilities en route to new resource

Speedware's new HP 3000 Web resource will be gaining programs from Jazz soon.

The vendor purchased host rights from HP for all the 3000- and migration-related content that Hewlett-Packard is releasing from 3000 division servers. Some HP content related to the 3000 has been retired by the vendor, such as the George Stachnik migration Webcasts of 2002-05. After Speedware posted streaming files for three Unix courses and one on IMAGE workalike database Eloquence, the vendor turns its attention to presenting the open source and HP-written utilities for MPE/iX.

Speedware's Nicolas Fortin told users the vendor could arrange early delivery of Jazz utilities for customers; send an e-mail to speedwareinfo@activant.com to request Jazz programs or HP white papers. Fortin estimated that the package of Jazz programs will be online next month. "I expect the process to take a few weeks, without unforeseen obstacles," he said. "So a few weeks from now would probably put us sometime in the month of May, to be realistic."

Jazz programs first surfaced this spring on the Client Server Web site. The software, often written directly by or with the help of customers, makes management of HP 3000s easier.

Ultimately the programs will reside on the OpenMPE server as well. Of the multiple host sources, Fortin added, "more than one company signed the agreement with HP, and so there will be more than one source to find the HP-licensed Jazz stuff, and some additional material. It's good for the community to have several sources to pick from. I’m sure there will be some differences between the sites, in the way they make the information available, its organization and user-friendliness. Ultimately the user will pick the location that suits them."

Sources of freeware outside of the HP host license restrictions are dwindling, even as these three Web sites come online. We'll have more on that aspect of 3000 freeware tomorrow.

Speedware hosts Eloquence, HP courses

Speedware opened an HP 3000 resource this week for online courses, the first step in Speedware's mission to host 3000-related training materials and free software. The initial service in the hosting covers HP's Unix training, but a more 3000-specific course is also online: Eloquence training from Marxmeier Software.

The Eloquence course was hosted on HP servers until Hewlett-Packard closed its HP 3000 labs last year, according to Speedware's Nicolas Fortin. Speedware will also be hosting the Jazz freeware as well as HP's 3000 documentation on the new 3000 resource site.

Registration is required to access the materials at the Speedware site, www.speedware.com/hp3ktraining. The company wants to collect name, company, address, telephone and e-mail information in exchange for access, "so we can track course usage and contact you when we have related news." The good news is that the materials do not require a "click to accept" button beneath several thousand words of HP's hosting agreement.

Nothing is perfect in life, or on the Web for free, so the training classes have a flaw: you cannot view them in anything other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. HP built these materials to require Active X controls installed in the browser, and only IE supports ActiveX. Firefox, Opera, and Apple's Safari won't show video from the training courses, so the slides are unavailable. The shot above shows everything we could get out of the "streaming" option which Firefox users will see. The IE version of the same Unix course, below, includes the slides.

About 2 users out of every 5 use something other than IE by now, in part because of the security threats that Microsoft's browser makes possible. The Mozilla Organization, which makes Firefox, explains why Active X is less secure than plug-in options.

"When you select media on a web page, Internet Explorer downloads the content and calls the appropriate ActiveX control, as requested by the web page, to load the playback application in the browser, potentially with little or no involvement, by you. Because this system is capable of automatically downloading new ActiveX controls without your involvement, it has been exploited by spyware, viruses, and other malicious software. Internet Explorer has improved ActiveX security in a number of ways, and many of the security loopholes have been closed in IE 7. However, it is still relatively easy to download and activate a malicious ActiveX control on your computer."

The access to online materials HP created and once hosted has always been problematic for some HP 3000 users who are making a transition, but 60 percent will experience no delay at all in viewing the courses at the new site. Speedware has done its good deed of offering these transition materials in the same format as HP created them.

Connect upgrades social network

The HP enterprise user group Connect leads a tour of its enhanced social networking tools and features tomorrow. Social networking is a key benefit of the group, formed last year when Encompass, the Tandem user group and HP Interex-Europe allied as one entity. Connect needs younger members, according to its leaders, so social networking was added last year to attract participation from a fresher demographic.

The one-hour tour of the new myCommunity begins at 10:30 CDT on Tuesday, April 14, a WebEx presentation that attendees must register for in advance.

Connect says the new features and tools at the social network myCommunity were built and implemented by Pluck, Inc., an Austin-based company that offers integrated social media for publishers, retailers and brands. Pluck says its technology platform powers more than 2.5 billion monthly interactions. Some of Pluck's clients include the Lance Armstrong Foundation, The Economist and Whole Foods.

Connect is calling the new myCommunity an "improved social media site," the second generation of a social net introduced last summer after the 2008 HP Technology Forum & Expo. The group says myCommunity "myCommunity is up and running in its new and improved format, and we'd like to show you how to get the most out of the site."

Gaining critical mass can be a lengthy process for any social network, especially one like myConnect that's focused on one vendor's enterprise solutions. The most dedicated of social networkers maintain profiles on multiple nets, such as Linked In (which has three groups devoted to some aspect of the HP 3000), Facebook, or Plaxo. The traffic on myCommunity up to this spring has been in a growth phase, and the prior tools and interface were created by another social net supplier, Leverage Software.

Pluck is part of the Demand Media social networking corporation, an enterprise that includes branded sites like science-fiction/fantasy site mania.com, how-to site ehow.com, and studios to help content providers build their own communities. Demand Media purchased Pluck, which was founded in 2003, last year. Tomorrow's WebEx tour is being hosted by Demand Media.

Some myCommunity members have included HP 3000 experience among their profiles, but the majority of the social network's participants are HP Unix, Windows or OpenVMS users. Since two of those three groups represent typical migration target platforms for 3000 migrators, Connect membership could be useful in creating an new wing of your IT network. You need to belong to Connect to join myCommunity, but membership is only $50 yearly. The tour tomorrow doesn't require membership.

HP leads G6 virtual tour online

HP showed off the future of online training yesterday during its three-hour ProLiant G6 Web Jam. The event that introduced the latest generation of Windows servers consisted of several recorded briefings from inside HP's ProLiant labs in Houston, live chats between viewers and HP staff, as well as documents such as white papers and data sheets.

That last element was provided in an Event Bag, a zip file of documents you select during the broadcast of the videos. HP ran the production out of its Virtual Events Central Web site. The interface conjures up a visit to a computer conference with separate entries to a networking lounge, exhibit hall or auditorium. On the main page of the conference "lobby," animated attendees pass across a carpeted area. (Traffic this light would have exhibitors upset at a real event.) It's all meant to invoke the spirit of attending a show. In some aspects, HP's Tuesday presentation did more than the vendor might have intended to cook up the show experience.

HP would not go to the expense to create this event without making it available afterward. You can still go to www.hp.com/go/web-jam to register and see the G6 team's videos and fill up your event bag. Being there yesterday would have put you in the company of several hundred other "attendees" for networking inside chat rooms.

If you'd dedicated time to watch the full event, and had a prerequisite knowledge of the ProLiant hardware, yesterday would have been training time well spent. HP essentially turned on a video camera when it briefed partners and staff about the sixth generation of ProLiant servers. Like at any good conference, HP's more technical presenters told the unvarnished truth about product design. One member of the Blades SWAT Team showed mentioned a component whose failure erases a ProLiant's midplane board serial number.

The unidentified member of the HP Blades SWAT Team also offered assurance that ProLiant customers will be able to recover from such a failure.

There’s only one active component on it. I always thought it was a bit ironic that if [this component] dies, the only thing that will happen is that you will lose the serial number as well as the spare part replacement number — the two things you need to replace this. Luckily, if you’re using System Insight Manager, the information is stored in your SIM database. But besides this component, this is nothing but a big thick piece of plastic with a lot of wires running through it.

HP includes an Onboard Administrator in every G6 that communicates with the SIM. HP says the component "is like having a programmable administrator inside each server. On HP ProLiant 100 series G6  servers, ProLiant Onboard Administrator Powered by iLO100 works hand-in-hand with HP Systems  Insight Manager, RBSU, ORCA, and the embedded Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) to  provide entry-level remote management and control."

The briefings unfolded in presentations of up to 20 minutes that reminded me more of reality TV than an HP infommercial. The camera work was on-the-fly instead of rehearsed, and sometimes the audio was a little light on the volume. When the attendees in the meeting rooms posed questions,  HP identified the speakers with a caption at the bottom of the screen. (You couldn't capture that bit of information in a real conference.) You can look at a few minutes of video from the teardown briefing by clicking on the screen shot above.

Those asking questions were clearly already well-versed in the ProLiant lineup, so this event might not have been much help for the novice Windows server administrator. You wouldn't find much contention in the Q&A, either, something that enriches a genuine conference session. It's not a stretch to say that those on hand were only examining how much greater the ProLiant-Windows solutions had just become. For example, John Obeto of SmallBizWindows.com (center, below) spoke up during the hardware tear-down session. Obeto wrote in 2006

We, contrary to current thought, encourage small businesses to upgrade to Windows Vista immediately upon release. Why? Barring any unforeseen last minute eventualities, [we count on] our experience with Vista [starting with] the release of Beta 1 back on August 3rd of 2005. Without a doubt, the security and usability enhancements alone make upgrading to Vista a no-brainer.

 There's not much need to color that exhortation in 2009, considering the disappointment that Vista has visited on so many customers. But with Miocrosoft and HP reportedly extending the Windows XP experience well into 2010, Vista is no reason to avoid these new ProLiant G6 units. They'll drive an enterprise with Windows 7, as an alternative.

If you've ever wondered what a factory tour at HP is like, the Web Jam's contents will give you a taste. Watching units come off an assembly line might not solve many system management problems in the future; it never did that for the customers who earned HP 3000 factory tours, either. But you could develop relationships with factory staff on those tours. At least in 2009, a tour like the one at the Jam will still enhance your confidence about investing in HP's solution. That was always the point of the 3000 factory tours, too.

I'm looking forward to a Web Jam for the HP Integrity server line, too, since the vendor has been promoting the Integrity as a 3000 replacement. The G6 Jam was produced by the Industry Standard Server (ISS) part of HP -- an operation with roots in Compaq's business and based in Houston (thus, the Central Daylight Time schedule for the event.) Integrity rolls out of a different HP unit.

HP shows off Gen 6 ProLiant servers

Register this morning for today's Webcast series to take the complete tour of HP's newest G6 ProLiant server line. The event is a string of seven Web presentations from HP covering the alternative hardware the vendor offers to many HP 3000 migrating customers.

HP calls this sixth generation G6, and these Webcasts start at 10 AM CST and run through early afternoon US Central Daylight Time. HP says

These Webcasts will bring you on-site to the ProLiant manufacturing facilities and server farms. You'll see product tear-down and meet the product managers and other HP personnel. After you've had a look, you can ask the engineers questions and meet independent bloggers who have similar jobs and interests.

Although the production values of these events will remind you of commercials, there's usually a good share of information to be picked up from evaluations like this from your desktop. Windows is shaping up as the most likely migration target for a 3000 customer, and the ProLiants are built for Linux as well.

HP's tentative agenda (times CDT) as of the evening before the event:

10:30   Intel Xeon 5500: HP has taken Intel technology to a whole new level. Check out what's under the hood: An HP ProLiant G6 server deep dive
  
10:45  Meet the Blades SWAT team. Take an in-depth look at HP's BladeSystem with the Blade SWAT team in their engineering lab.
  
11:15  See how easy HP makes it to dramatically simplify server set-up
  
11:45  Get "Greener IT" from HP -- Use your power wisely and dramatically reduce wasted energy
  
12:15  Factory Express – See a quick view of where it all comes together: HP’s customized and integrated factory solution tour
  
12:45  Squeeze every bit of productivity out of your server with ProLiant G6