Database recovery delivered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Database recovery delivered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP raises hopes, profits and revenues

Hewlett-Packard intended to release its full Q2 2008 fiscal report yesterday, but a little event like spending $13.9 billion on EDS has pushed the full report back to next week. A full quarterly report is always enlightening, a bit like Kremlinology of the 1970s — watching which business sectors stand shorter or taller on the company's dais. The health of HP's Services business is one of the leaders we watch, since Services is the sector where HP still collects 3000 customer revenues. HP's Services growth was flat during the last quarterly report, which might explain why the HP board swallowed the EDS deal just now.

EDS wasn't generating much of a profit when HP announced its intention to buy the company, but that didn't push HP's stock down for very long after the announcement. By Thursday HP shares had recovered about half of what they lost on the EDS news — a loss of more market cap than EDS is worth altogether.

But HP reported good preliminary news of its finances that may have helped allay any uncertainty about EDS. The preliminary results reported revenue of $28.3 billion compared with $25.5 billion one year ago. The vendor also raised its "guidance" (estimates) for business in the rest of fiscal 2008.

In the second quarter, preliminary GAAP [Generally Accepted Accounting Practices] diluted earnings per share (EPS) were $0.80 and non-GAAP diluted EPS were $0.87, compared with second quarter fiscal 2007 GAAP diluted EPS [Earnings Per Share] of $0.65 and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.70. Non-GAAP diluted EPS estimates exclude after-tax costs related primarily to the amortization of purchased intangible assets of approximately $0.07 per share and $0.05 per share in the second quarter of fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2007, respectively.

HP felt compelled to add in its preliminary notice that business was good across the board. "The second quarter results were highlighted by solid performance across HP's business segments and strong cash flow from operations," the company said on the same day of the EDS announcement.

HP estimates full-year FY08 revenue will be approximately $114.2 billion to $114.4 billion, up from its previous estimate of $113.5 billion to $114 billion. FY08 GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of $3.30 to $3.34, up from its previous estimate of $3.26 to $3.30

One of the tenets of the HP Way has always been "maintain profits," so the motivation for HP's product and service decisions can be read in a corporate balance sheet and the PowerPoint presentations that accompany the news. On May 20 at 5 PM EDT, the company will present the full picture. An audio Webcast of the conference call will be available at www.hp.com/investor/q22008webcast. HP usually releases a PowerPoint slide deck (in PDF format) at its financials Web site at the same time.

HP to present 3000 report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Software Library opens for lending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To-do list for documentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   •  Printers
        - hardware maintenance records of system line printers.

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

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

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

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

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

Document your homesteading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QSS gathers another 3000 HP expert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ERP and 3000 meet in Friday Web VRUG

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

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

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

The full agenda, as released by CAMUS:

Agenda (All times listed are Central Time)

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

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

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

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

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

12:15pm – 12:20pm - Break

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

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

Hosted by Infor

Local attendees are cordially invited to the broadcast site:

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

Checking out the Contributed Software Library

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inventing a new home for Invent3k

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP converts MPE/iX to social net app

In a responsible effort to recycle more than 30 years of programming code, Hewlett-Packard has decided to re-purpose MPE/iX as a social networking application. The news we received from a usually reliable source reports that HP has been searching for an appropriate future for the HP 3000 operating system for more than seven years. Executives have hit on a new social network as an ideal mission for the 33-year-old software.

"We're reaching to become more popular with customers younger and less gray than the 3000 community," said HP spokesman Ben E. Fitforeyou. "This MPE/iX software isn't going anywhere unless we do something about it, and HP is willing to take its chances and charge into the future. We see MPE/iX as a way to bring thousands of computer professionals together for significant social interchange."

A coalition of user groups and advocacy boards, including the DEL/3000 Special Interest Group, the New Wave Association, and HP's Business Report Writers, have agreed to be a test bed for the MPE/iX revision. A core of HP's retired 3000 developers are rolling up their sleeves on the technological transformation, expected to be completed by December of 2010.

"There's a big change a-brewing for MPE/iX," said D. David Brown, the development leader directing the core team from Montange d'Mystere, Switzerland. "I've been waiting more than 20 years for something as important as this."

A new conference on the horizon

Three weeks from today, the HP Technology Forum becomes a little more expensive item on HP professionals' itinerary. The early bird registration discount ends on April 18, about two months before the mid-June meeting of HP and its customers, partners and employees.

Encompass and the ITUG user groups have been the driving forces for content in the conference, and the meeting's Expo floor generates revenues for the groups. The need to attend the Technology Forum will seem greatest to the HP 3000 site doing a migration, since almost all of the seminar content and confidential disclosure briefings address non-3000 solutions.

Some HP 3000 community partners will be exhibiting on the Expo floor. At the left you'll see (with an added click for detail) the overall agenda for the four days of meetings and networking, so you can start planning your travel. But at the moment there's no evidence of specific HP 3000 content scheduled for the June 16-19 conference. There's plenty to learn about HP's Unix, or Windows, or even OpenVMS — although that last environment isn't on the destination list for many 3000 users who are sticking with HP in their migrations.

Nevertheless, the June meeting presents the world's largest computer company in all of its enterprise glory, a meeting devoted to operating and improving computer user experience on the target platforms HP wants to sell its 3000 customers. The final word on the proposed consolidation of four HP user groups will also take stage in Las Vegas.

The discount for registering for the Forum by April 18 is "your choice of $100 gift certificate to HPShopping.com or HP's Logo Store." The HP shopping Web site offers desktops and notebooks among its most enterprise-oriented products (but nary a computer ships with anything other than Windows Vista, an OS gaining more problems with its first Service Pack release.) You can put your $100 toward a flatscreen TV for the executive boardroom, though. Joining Encompass earns you a discount off the $1,695 full conference pass, or off the $695 day pass, but the Encompass member discount doesn't have a deadline.

A new poll has popped up on the Encompass Web site about the top reasons which are luring people to the event:

Technical Education     65%
Networking Opportunities     52%
Hands-on Technical Labs     38%
Pre-conference Seminars     29%
The Technology Expo     29%
Advocacy Opportunities     15%
Keynotes by HP Executives     18%
Discounted Onsite Certification Testing     13%
Chapters & Special Interest Group Events     11%

Of all the attractions listed, the final one will reveal the new name for the consolidated user group.

Without much in the way of conference session specifics, we're left to learn that that Mark Hurd, HP Chairman and CEO; Ann Livermore, Executive VP TSG; and Randy Mott, Executive VP and CIO will be speakers. It's early in the registration process, so early that the space on the Expo floor is still being sold by Encompass user group management partner Smith Bucklin.

Ask A Migration Expert

A new Web-based service offers free advice and answers questions with direct e-mail replies to customers in the 3000 community

The community bristles with spots to ask migration questions, including the HP 3000 newsgroup, engagements with consultants, and even initial meetings with prospective migration suppliers. Speedware has opened several Web pages to gather and then answer questions for free.

The Ask a Migration Expert page is “another avenue to ask questions,” said Speedware’s marketing director Chris Koppe. The page at speedware.com/solutions/HPe3000_migration/ask-migration-expert.html, taps “an unmatched talent pool here,” he said.

The goal is to expose Speedware’s group of HP 3000 experts to the community, “and let more than just our customers benefit from it.” Questions are directed to the Speedware experts who provide answers through a separate e-mail contact. A link on the main Ask An Expert site opens up a list of community members' typical questions

An FAQ page pops up frequently asked migration questions, too. Speedware plans to build out the FAQ information.

Migration brings a lot of attention through the Web, Koppe added, and some questions arrive from misdirected but earnest people looking for advice on immigration, or emigration.

“We’ve gotten questions from a person in the Philippines like, “Is it open to Ireland government for Filipinos? What is the qualification to migrate in Ireland?’ Or from a person in Iran: ‘How can I take a visa from your embassy in Iran? is it possible for me to go to the Netherlands?’ “

Speedware will be enhancing the Ask a Migration Expert service over the next few months, he added. “Having it at our site is useful, but having it visible from other sites and allowing other people to benefit from it is a better use of it.”

Becoming big: a task to grab by the tail

    I can’t imagine a world where the Web doesn’t play a big role in success. But as IT pros, you know better than to believe any computing tool always delivers as expected. Downtime, mistaken design; these life lessons become experience and then wisdom. Somehow the Internet seems to escape this skepticism, since it connects us in innovative ways. We’re all counting on the Web like gravity, government forms, and mergers designed make organizations bigger and better. Smaller is supposed to be weaker, in that last model.

   This month a few bigger-is-better alliances have been put in play. Microsoft and the HP user group Encompass both want to be bigger, adding allies. Microsoft made a $44 billion bid for Yahoo, a deal nearly double the size of the HP-Compaq merger of 2002. Microsoft might have sledding ahead of it just as tough as Hewlett-Packard's merger. HP CEO Carly Fiorina battled an angry, nearly equal share of stockholders to push through her merger back in 2002. It looks like Yahoo might push back with as much force, saying the record-breaking offer is undervalued for an information content provider.

   Much has been made about this deal being a way for Microsoft to keep up with Google. A few years ago Yahoo was compared to Google in the pages of Wired. That was long before Google was trading above $500 a share.

   The merger tussle reminds me of the days when HP was working to adopt Compaq, a company which had fallen from its heyday as Yahoo has now. At least Fiorina had Compaq’s board in her pocket when HP did its big grab. Yahoo is pushing back already, so expect another messy fight. Not so with the Encompass alliance and its new user group partners.

    It took HP CEO Fiorina’s firing and more than three years to make the HP purchase “a good earner,” as they say in the wiseguy movies. I wonder what Microsoft will need to succeed.

    Mergers can be delicate operations, attempts to embrace each other which the Web is expected to enable. Encompass and its two new partners, Interex Europe and the ITUG group, see the Web’s social networking tools as a way to attract younger members. The new Endeavor group wants to create community instead of an association. The latter sounds aged, while the former sounds fun.

    One Encompass director pointed out that the merger of corporations is very different from making allies out of user groups. Chris Koppe talked of mergers “being one of those things where somebody decides to buy somebody else. User groups don’t come together as quickly, but I think this [association] is getting close to where we want to be. Individually it was very hard to get HP’s attention, and that model now changes going forward.”

   Being big is within reach when you can stretch across the Wide World of the Web. Using the Web as a lever to connect can deliver benefits, especially if you can be in the business of delivering the hard to find. That’s the Long Tail theory that’s made Amazon and Netflix work. Neither claims to be the biggest. But they succeed by specialization. Specialization, plus the Web, has let the NewsWire connect with your community. Perhaps social contact through the Web will let user groups, maybe Microsoft, grab you by the tail.

Do expiring certifications cost community?

A few days ago I wrote about the benefits of certification as a trained HP 3000 professional. I thought that being a "CP," as some of the certified pros call themselves, entitled a 3000 pro to the HP PowerPatch tapes for MPE/iX, and other software.

Not so. You earn those tapes by joining HP's DSPP program for developers. Paul Edwards, the education expert who corrected me on those tapes, said he gets his hand-addressed from HP's Alvinia Nishimoto, "so I'm pretty sure those are custom tapes" that HP's putting out.

But the certification benefits? Edwards says that they are in the eye of beholder, most of the time. A CP can get mugs, shirts and hats from the HP Certified Professional store, things to carry or wear to client visits. Edwards says that since the 3000 certs are going dormant on June 1, he has until the end of May to shop.

Any certification is no better than the person who carries it; that's to say that passing a test and knowing how to solve a support problem are two different things. Incentives for taking the tests and keeping up should be the vendor's mission. Passing these things can be a real challenge.

Finding HP's benefits for remaining certified is something of a challenge, too, once you get beyond the HP CP brand store. HP summarizes them so:

HP Certified Professional Connection portal and knowledgebase

   Software download tools, including:
          ProLiant Software Maintenance Pack (SmartStart)
          Onsite Agent's Reference Set (OARS) Active
          Onsite Agent's Reference Set (OARS) Archive
          Commercial Software Support
          HP Parts Reference Guide (PRG)

    Access to exclusive training events and online training
    Discounts to training events and certification exams
    Free course material download for select certification training courses
    Regular "Tech Talk" webcasts providing updates from product engineers and other key personnel on the latest in HP technology, product and solution advancements

Participation in Confidential Disclosure Agreement(CDA) sessions at HP events
Invitations to regional, large industry events such as the HP Technology Forum and Expo, HP PartnerTRAIN, HP Tru64 UNIX Bootcamp and many more
Local "relationship events" and knowledge transfer events with HP field personnel

    Certification Program Office information line (toll free in the United States and Canada), including "Cert Alert" outgoing recorded phone messages with program updates
    Regular communication from the Certification Program Office, including program updates and alerts via e-mail
    Discounted HP Product Purchase Plan (United States and Canada only)
    Certification website and certification news items
    Access to HP Certified Professional Logo merchandise store
    The right to use program logos and branding to enhance your image in your company and with your customers

One user group ring bands them all

HP user group Encompass took a big step toward the ultimate alliance of HP enterprise computer customers this week, when the largest North American HP user group announced it will unite with two of the others. Now Encompass, the Tandem group ITUG, and HP-Interex Europe/Middle East/Africa will all work together, bound under a single group which will have a new name announced sometime this year. HP-Interex EMEA was allied with the now-defunct HP user group Interex, but Interex EMEA survived Interex North America's 2005 bankruptcy.

This week's move nearly completes a consolidation of at least six user groups which existed in 2005. Encompass and Interex North America had worked on a few annual HP World user meetings together prior to that date, but when Interex shut its doors suddenly, Encompass took on some Interex members. Still, groups from the NonStop/Tandem base, OpenView, overseas Interex groups and Asia/Pacific membership still remained as separate advocacy and information points. HP had to listen to all, but wished for one group to represent everybody.

Board director Chris Koppe, a former Interex North America director, alerted us of the new assembly, which now is only missing the OpenView users group Vivit to complete the group roster. Encompass brings 16,000 members, ITUG 2,500 and Interex EMEA 33,000 — but increasing the size of the group is not as important as the membership's scope. HP's liaison with customers will grow more focused in  a single, larger group.

"In the days when I was working at Interex, this was something was all wished would happen, that the user groups would follow HP's path," Koppe said of the merger. "Corporate mergers are one of those things where somebody decides to buy somebody else. User groups don't come together as quickly, but I think this is getting close to where we want to be. Individually it was very hard to get HP's attention, and that model now changes going forward."

Users of all the groups, which include Encompass Asia/Pacific, will receive a free one year membership to the combined group.

Encompass spread the news through a press release on its Web site (PDF file), plus a blog entry from Encompass board president Nina Buik which defined the new association. Merger, she says, is not the right word to describe what's bringing together thousands of members.

Buik said in her entry from Tuesday,

The word merge implies that someone, or rather a group, is giving up something and that’s not the case here and couldn’t be further from the truth. We are uniting from positions of strength and equity bringing the best of our complementary skills together in the new organization.

She added that Encompass will be "putting this before the membership for a vote this spring." Koppe said Hewlett-Packard has been hopeful this kind of consolidation would happen among user organizations.

"Today, all of these organizations have a much higher level of sponsorship in HP than they had in the past," he said. "HP has been quite supportive of the idea of us doing this [unification]. They've taken and back seat in it and don't want to be pushing it, because it's not their organization."

Combining the groups into a single unit "has the ability to carry more weight within HP as an advocacy source," Koppe said. "If HP wants to know what their customers are saying, here's the largest group of their customers, and they're all highly organized. The ability to effect change on HP will be much bigger than it's been before."

Bay Area 3000 education, now online

Training and advisories are now online from last year's e3000 Community Meet, Bayside 2007. Some of the news from a full day of presentations from experts and advocates, which explored both homesteading and migration strategies, is available at the event's Web site:

www.hpmigrations.com/sfevent

What you'll find is a way to collect the wisdom of the seasoned professionals who met all day on a Saturday just before Thanksgiving. HP's 3000 updates on its 2008-2010 plans is included, as well as slides on Migration Solutions, moving MPE to HP's Unix and Linux, and even a photo album. (We've reported on homesteading strategies from Allegro Consultants in a prior blog post.)

On the event Web site you can also read a certain newsletter editor's after-lunch speech, for those who might have nodded off, as well as those who couldn't attend.

Here's some direct links to the papers, if you'd like to pick and choose.

• HP e3000 Business Update
  (Jenny Hou, HP)
  
  
• HP e3000 Migration Solutions Overview
  (Chris Koppe, Speedware)
  
  
• 2008: Feeling an ledge, or an edge?
  (Ron Seybold)
  
  
• MPE to HP-UX (and Linux), a Case Study
  (Rick Gilligan)
  
  
• COBOL Update
  (Micro Focus)
  
  
• Communities and User Groups: Worlds of Opportunity
  (Encompass Representative)
  
  
• Powerhouse Update
  (Jean-Pierre Fortin, Cognos)

A few other presentations filled the room of 3000 customers and partners, but they aren't yet represented on the event Web page. As the only HP 3000 event of 2007, the Web page notes, "Your attendance ensured that 2007's only event resulted in a successful opportunity for networking, exchanging new information and renewing acquaintances and friendships."

 

Top 2007 Stories, Part 3

Halfway through our recap of the Top Stories of the 3000 community's 2007, we should pause to take note of the top story from 20 years earlier. Writing a history of a community like yours, where continuity is the 3000's credo, led me to back issues of the HP Chronicle, the newsmagazine I had the pleasure of editing from 1984 through 1992.

Halfway through those crucial eight years, the community finally saw the rollout of the first PA-RISC HP 3000 — the same technology HP created to run the systems still in mission critical service today. HP called its RISC project Spectrum. The first system was a Series 930, shipped to ASK Computer just before Labor Day. Labor was the key word to describe the new computer, which I wrote "was undermanned from the first day. HP sold so few 930s, [all to Bay Area customers] that it promised the Series 950 loaded with a more powerful processor on the same schedule."

The Year 1987 represented the high-water mark of the system's footprint in the world of computing. HP announced it had shipped the 30,000th HP 3000 system, moving from 20,000 installed to 30,000 in just two years' time.

But during 2007, 3000 hardware made a different kind of news. Reliability services became more widespread than ever, operated by independent HP 3000 veterans making use of low-cost RISC systems. Nothing as elderly as a Series 950, but systems with more horsepower and life left in them than you might expect.

6. A few blocks of San Francisco went without power on an afternoon in July, and massive chunks of the Internet was knocked out. Big companies and famous sites. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted the popular sites that were knocked out:

LiveJournal and Second Life went dead, AdBrite dimmed, Craigslist became unlisted, the 1Up gaming network went down, Facebook turned blank, Six Apart couldn't get it together, and Yelp was rendered silent.

The disaster lasted a few hours, a wakeup call for any 3000 owner who believes the system will never fail because it never has over years, perhaps more than a decade. We reviewed what we offered as a guide to DR services, including a new turnkey operation opened up for multiple OS environments at Hill Country Technologies. The story included Web links to many services who understand the mission critical needs of the 3000.

5. HP rolled out a crucial patch to disable the Large Files function for IMAGE/SQL's greater than 4GB datasets. The repairs were the first of two critical repairs for the database, both engineered in a hurry to give the customers assurance of the 3000's stability. HP later repaired Large Files with a binary-level patch and the first fix for the 3000's millicode in 16 years. Fast response, available to the entire 3000 community, regardless of a customer's support relations with HP. Surprising, during the sixth year after HP announced its 3000 exit plans.

4. Jennie Hou took the reins from Dave Wilde as business manager for HP 3000 operations at HP. She may oversee the exit of HP from the 3000 community, but the new manager said that HP doesn't have a confirmed date for ending its 3000 support. We asked Hou, "Does HP intend to exit the support business for the 3000 at some date?"

Of course. Eventually there will be no HP support of the 3000. HP will exit that support business completely. HP cares about our installed base and wants to help our customers in maintaining a stable e3000 environment while they conduct their migrations. Therefore, the support model evolves based on customer needs and balanced business approach.

Already in August, though, HP was talking about a conceptual model to extend its support business. Nothing official at that time, though.

PDF news for perusal, or pursuing the past

While we lean our ear onto the rail to listen for news in this quiet holiday season, it seemed time to point out some online resources we've put into place to read print editions of The 3000 NewsWire. Issues are available both new (November 2007's print) and a few old ones as well.

Late last month we posted our full print issue for November, a new feature of the NewsWire as we entered our 13th year of listening and reporting. PDF is hardly a new technology, which actually makes it a good choice for a community like ours, so focused on reliable solutions. Since the issue includes our sponsors' ads, we advise that you use a broadband link to download the latest, since it's about 20 MB — with resolution enough so you can print a custom copy with pages for your own issue.

We are continuing to print and mail our quarterly issues, just so nobody in the community gets confused. This is extra exposure. PDF technology lets us push these printed pages even farther than postal delivery — just like this blog puts the news online faster than our old printed and Online Extras ever could.

We'll be back with more news to report for tomorrow. But ah, it's already the eve of what much of the world will consider a five-day holiday around Christmas. Or at least four, if you're finishing up projects tomorrow.

Today we also moved the location of the 2005 issues of our FlashPaper, the hot-news rundown we wrote and printed for 10 years, inserted just before our mailing date. There's nothing new in these documents, but keeping track of promises and plans more than two years later might be worthwhile for the advocates of the system's HP end-game.

The FlashPaper PDF are easy to track down, but we won't add more to that archive just yet. You can click on the links below to peruse stories already considered historic, in some quarters, about the story of the HP 3000. (These are modest little files that download in a blink, fast as the Flash, since it was only a two-page roundup.)

January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005

HP liberates some 3000 patches

Customers of all types, self-supporting and third-party supported, as well as those with HP support can now download new HP 3000 patches. Well, not exactly new, but tested long enough to gain the HP support labs' elusive General Release status.

An HP advisory has outlined a raft of patches which HP labeled as Recommended fixes for HP 3000s running MPE/iX 7.5, 7.0 and 6.5. The patches can be downloaded from the HP IT Response Center Web site by any customer running an HP 3000. According to HP support, a Recommended patch

should be applied at your earliest convenience. There is potential for sub-optimal performance, lock-ups or unwanted  shutdowns. This will protect your system from a serious, but not  unrecoverable failure.

More than a dozen such patches were identified as General Release fixes in an HP patch advisory from last week. None bring extra functionality to the HP 3000 customer, unless you count 7.0 patch MPEMXQ3B, which HP described as "Enhancement: Load PDC [Processor Dependent Code] into main memory on A- and N-Class systems." The patch is a fix for a problem which has much more serious consequence — a panic — on HP's Unix systems, according to HP's notes.

The advantage of this patch seems to be giving diagnostics software better performance. HP's details on the "enhancement" patch, from the HP Web page

Intermittent small system freezes and system software clock slips happen on multiprocessor A- and N-Class systems. The clock slips are not gradual, they happen in steps of several seconds each.

The clock slips occur when a CPU that tries to load and run PDC code from NVRAM has to block on a condition where the system bus is too busy. Loading (copying) the PDC code from NVRAM (EEPROM) into normal memory will avoid any blocking for PDC code and will also make its execution significantly faster. 

MPE code using PDC calls (mainly diagnostics) will see increased performance.

This is a solution borrowed from HP-UX where similar issues were seen with A-, L- and N-Classes. Unlike the HP-UX code though, MPE will not ‘panic’ if it cannot relocate the PDC.  MPE will fallback to execute PDC from NVRAM instead (just like without this patch).

HP explains that the patch applies the enhancement by reducing the amount of memory available for the OS and applications by 2MB.

Of such specific repairs and minute enhancements are the General Releases of 2007 made. Other patches now in GR, most to avoid System Aborts (SA):

MPENX08A - SA0 attempting to boost the priority of a completed disk I/O

MPEMXU5C - FSCHECK error header record main_rec count did not match actual count

MPEMXP3C - SA614 when POSIX app writes past limit of fixed-length record file

MPEMXC7C - SA 0 With An Invalid Virtual Address

MPEMX59B - Workaround For OCT Cornercase Involving SCANFMVAT CM Code

MPELXY8B - SA1350 during termination of a process with DEBUG breakpoints set

MPELXJ7C - Data Loss When Using TAR with MPE fixed ASCII Files

MPEMXW2A - SA5414 while running FCSCAN in a loop

MPEMXM7A - DAT fails to open Disc to Disc dump when limit is a multiple of 4096MB

MPELXT1D - Network Spooler: 2 fixes for PJL syntax errors, NMS 9621

INTHDH4A - General Fixes for Internet Services Products (such as INETD and REMSH) on MPE/iX 7.5

INTHD63A - General Fixes for Internet Services Products on MPE/iX 7.0

HP has moved some patches for the 3000 into General Release at a much faster clip, when the potential for data corruption loomed, even for just a few customers. While many sites will leave this list of patches alone, some might be a repair for a system which must continue to carry mission critical data for an indefinite future of homesteading.

Even with the GRs for patches announced in one massive e-mail notice, however, dozens more remain quarantined in beta test status. Genuine advances such as the brand-new SCSI Pass Through driver need to be implemented and tested by HP support customers — the only ones who can use a BT patch.

No bad questions, no matter how late

More than six years beyond HP's exit the market announcement, customers are still just starting their migration plans. Up on the Linked In networking site, one member posed this question.

A relative of mine (who doesn't have access to linkedin.com yet) is taking proposals for migration strategies for his HP 3000 machine and all the software and data which resides on the machine. HP has recently quit supporting the HP 3000, so a new machine is required, and something needs to happen to all the COBOL and databases on it.

One bid received will cost 10s of thousands of dollars simply for a migration plan, with the actual migration being a separate bid. This particular migration will be to a Windows environment upon which the same or similar COBOL will continue to run. Any suggestions?

Mark Stoddard
Software Engineer, APT Automation

The suggestions have been around for years now, but since we're Linked In members (you can be one too), we posted this summary reply for Mark's relative who's facing migration's challenge.

Since HP canceled its 3000 business plans in 2001, I've heard from hundreds of smallish businesses faced with this problem. We don't sell services. We interview and publish reports on how customers and service providers solve these problems.

Your relative needs to answer a question to decide how to proceed.

1. What is the primary reason for migrating off the 3000?

A) HP support is no longer available
B) The system cannot keep up with computing needs
C) HP's business strategy no longer includes new HP 3000 models.
D) A mission-critical application provider is quitting on you, its customer

Mark should know

A) More responsive and less costly independent support has been available for many years for the system. HP will support HP 3000s for another two years.

B) A 3000 system that cannot keep up with computing needs can be replaced for many dollars less than a migration plan. If the computer is a 9x8 or 9x7 server, a replacement system is especially economical.

C) HP changed its plans for the 3000 because of the small growth rate of the business -- not because of a flaw in the system. HP 3000s will continue to run through 2027. If purchasing a computer with a long future in front of it is the goal, I wish your relative good luck at finding something with an assured path of improvement. Critical mass determines business futures. Windows has more than any choice today, but it comes with its own hurdles to consider.

D) You've got to move away unless you can acquire and keep up source code for the application. This is the most compelling reason to migrate as soon as possible.

Windows is having its heyday now, Linux is on the rise, and the future of HP's Unix presumes to run through 2016. As HP 3000 owners know, however, things can change overnight. No guarantees.

Any migration plan is going to cost at least tens of thousands of dollars, and the execution and testing will cost even more. Assume that financial burden, or extend the use of the 3000 to a point where the migration budget becomes available, through setting aside part of the IT budget each year for the project. Assign the planning for your first expense, to determine the budget. This is an essential first step.

Migration makes sense once you have budget to spend wisely. Many HP 3000 sites have hurried migrations, at great cost, only to see HP extend its system support.

Another suggestion: Make sure your target for the project includes an improved database, system and operating environment, as well as a broader range of application providers. Migration simply because HP has changed business plans, doesn't make fiscal sense.

Specific solution suggestions: Consider AcuCOBOL for the target compiler, if the applications being migrated are in-house; it's most like the 3000's COBOL II. Assess Eloquence for the database, since it's gotten rave reviews and emulates the work of IMAGE, your current 3000 database. Luckily, both are available on Windows.

As for Windows, we hear that a common mistake is to choose Windows as a migration target on the basis of familiarity with the platform, and low capital acquisition cost. If either of these are the primary reason for picking Windows, think harder. Maintaining Windows is a budget-eating task, and the environment is changing all the time -- so whatever familiarity your relative's IT group might have with Windows is going to shrink, unless there's training and good Windows support in the picture.

There's no lack of good companies to inventory and assess your relative's needs in migration. Tell everyone to pursue the project with care, as well as tune out the "we gotta hurry" you will be told by some companies. Unless your application supplier is turning off 3000 support, the timetable to migrate is yours to choose. Major industry leaders plan to use their HP 3000s beyond 2010. The only entity that has quit supporting the 3000 is Hewlett-Packard's marketing and manufacturing departments. Even HP development resource, albeit pared back significantly, works to this very day for 3000 sites. HP still sells software for the 3000.

In 2001 HP predicted the end of the 3000's ecosystem by the end of 2006. Now the company is proceeding through 2010 with limited support. Judge wisely. You have time to make the right decisions.

Webcast shows off 10 gigabit Ethernet

Thursday afternoon (US time) HP will be showing off its fastest enterprise networking to date. In a 2PM Eastern Webcast, Network and Storage IO Manager Parissa Mohamadi of HP will give a tour of the features of the "10 GbE" offering on both Integrity and PA-RISC servers.

Sign up for the Webcast at the Encompass site; membership is not required for this program. Supply the password "hpencompass" at the start of the registration form, then choose your own password for the Webcast. The briefing is designed for datacenter managers.

While this networking advance doesn't operate on the HP 3000, the new technology is a selling point in advancing a migration strategy. Benefits of a migration need to go beyond the "we're getting off the HP 3000" target, and new technology like this can make better use of virtualization capabilities in HP-UX.

The Encompass Webcast is sponsored by Neterion, which has its XFrame II devices at the heart of HP's 10GbE. The XFrame II relies on Ethernet, which Neterion describes "the proven industry-standard for 30 years." If that sounds like the server in your environment which HP is stepping away from, well, Ethernet has had technology refreshes over and over again.

The fastest Ethernet traffic an HP 3000 can handle today is 100 megabits. Customers asked HP for 1-gigabit networking for many years, but the vendor always said the project was too large for HP's remaining MPE/iX development resources. The new technology is 10 times faster than the enhancement request HP declined back in 2004.

The Neterion device also has drivers for Windows and Linux servers as well as HP-UX, but it's a good bet that the HP IO expert will focus on the benefits you might capture using HP's Integrity servers running HP-UX. Encompass offered a pre-briefing interview (MP3 file, 90 seconds) with Mohamadi on the networking and clustering technology. HP says the technology can save costs, power, and bus slots while providing a "future-proofed IO architecture."

Full details on how to sign on for the Webcast (20 slots were open this morning):

If you have never participated in an Encompass/HP webcast, click on 'First Time Users Click Here To Register' and follow the steps below:

    * Use hpencompass as your signup password
    * You will need to create a User ID and password for yourself (this is different from your Encompass ID and password); it is important that you remember this information as you will need it when you log into the Web site on the day of the webcast.
    * Once you have created your ID and password you will be logged into the system, click on 'course catalog.'
    * Select the appropriate Webcast and confirm your enrollment.
    * Please be sure to test your PC on the HP Virtual Room prior to the webcast. If you any have problems when you test, please call the HP Virtual Room help desk at (888) 351-4732 so that the problem can be solved prior to the webcast.
    * Please note the RegonTap registration website will NOT work with Macs or Linux machines.

If you have participated in an HP/Encompass Webcast in the past, enter your ID and Password and then select 'Course Catalog' and click on the Webcast

Still hiring after all these years

It's not a commonplace discovery, but we do see job postings for HP 3000 expertise and management in the IT world today. These positions can be nearly full-time, but rarely permanent. However, any employment that relies on MPE/iX savvy is worth a look, if you're an IT pro who wants to leverage many years of experience.

One such job we noted just this week is at CDI Corporation, a $1 billion "professional services company that offers Fortune 1000 clients a cost-effective, single-source provider of high-value engineering and information technology outsourcing solutions and professional staffing."

CDI has a need for a 3000 MPE/iX and IBM AIX administrator, which would be quite a mix in a single IT pro. The job listing is up on Gadball.com, where it says that "Data migration and software upgrades are key areas of this project."

The job is in Richmond, Virginia, but the important part to recall is that Google's alert service turned it up for us. What's more the migration process in play across your community can force open some employment doors, too.

These positions have decreased substantially in number during the six years since HP announced its exit from the platform. That's to be expected. But they haven't disappered. Another year's worth of work, in Chicago, came up on Gadball, where Phillip Bue, the Senior Recruiting Manager with Ajilon Consulting, offered a job taking care of a 3000 while the regular IT staff did a migration:

During this project term, Client's permanent MIS staff will be transitioning from the HP 3000 to another computing environment. Consultant will report to the designated Client MIS Project Manager.

Two notes of interest here. First, hiring a temporary 3000 administrator and manager can free up the experienced IT staff to move in-house apps to a new environment. Customers report that putting the experience on the target box problem provides a better solution, since the seasoned team knows the apps and the user base.

Second note: If you have managed an HP 3000, and can travel to the likes of Virginia or Chicago, take heart. There's still HP 3000 work out there for you.

How to do a final 3000 shutdown

A few weeks ago, a customer asked how to turn off an HP 3000 once and for all. While this is a sad time for the IT expert who's built a career on MPE knowledge, doing a shutdown by the numbers is in keeping with the rest of the professional skill-set you can expect from a 3000 manager.

Chris Bartram, who has launched and stocks a Technical Wikipedia (TWiki) for the 3000, offered all the details of turning off an HP 3000. "I have just performed last rites for a 9x8 server at a customer site," he replied, "and have been through the exercise a couple times before."

His steps did not include SOX requirements, but "might be useful," he said in his usual modest introduction. There are 10 steps Bartram details before switching off the 3000's power button.

Bartram reported that he first purged all accounts except sys, hpspool, and 3000devs (and had to log off all jobs, shut down the network, and disable system UDCs to do that). Then:

2) Reset/blanked all system passwords (groups, users, accounts)

3) Purged all groups from SYS account that I could (aside from in-use groups) as well as all users except MANAGER.SYS,OPERATOR.SYS, MANAGER.HPSPOOL.

4) Went through PUB.SYS listf (file by file) looking for anything that might be a job stream or contain user data (or anything not critical to keeping the system up) and PURGEd it

5) Went into VOLUTIL and condensed my discs

6) Created a group called JUNK.SYS (you would need to do this on each volset; this box only had the system vol set)

7) Wrote and ran a short script that copied NL.PUB.SYS (the largest file remaining on the system) into JUNK.SYS in a loop using filenames A####### and X####### until all disc space was used up

8) Typed the command PURGEGROUP JUNK.SYS

9) Went into NMMGR and changed IP addresses on the box to something bland/different; including the default gateway (also deleted any entries in the NS directory if there are any)

10) Sequentially PURGE @.GROUP.ACCT for all groups (leaving PUB.SYS until last)

11) Shut down the box.

I am reminded of the line from Citizen Kane, which I enjoyed on Turner Classic Movies this week. "Then, as it must for every man, death came to Charles Foster Kane." Nothing escapes death, but a proper burial seems in order for such a legendary system.

HP shares open source porting tips

At the last HP Technology Forum, HP's 3000 group announced the upcoming release of a Samba Porting Paper. The document, first promised in June, proposes to show the 3000 community the methods HP used to bring Samba from a 2.x version to a 3.026 version for MPE/iX.

The paper is now available as a PDF download from HP. It's been available since late September of this year, apparently, so we must have missed HP's announcement or notice that it was ready for use.

Not for lack of interest, either. Robert Mills of 3000 site Pinnacle Arvato was looking forward to it in September, searching for assistance to make open source Python/iX an up-to-date solution for his 3000. HP reports the paper has been online since Sept. 26. That is, by the way, the same day that HP announced it was extending its 3000 support to 2010, in a limited, no-patch fashion.

A document like this one is important to keeping an HP 3000 working as hard as it can. Open source was part of the renaissance of the 3000 community back in the 1990s. Samba came into the customers' tool kit as a result of an after-hours project by Lars Appel, an HP 3000 support engineer in Europe. Appel is now working for Eloquence database creators Marxmeier Software, but the Samba snowball he rolled down the slope is still moving for MPE/iX users.

Another open source resource for the 3000 community, Mark Bixby, told the customers that learning to update the open source solutions like Samba, DNS and Apache for MPE/iX would be an essential skill to successful 3000 homesteading. HP is helping with the education with this paper.

A Unix feature to move you

Six years ago, HP calculated that much of its 3000 community would move to HP-UX. Enterprise customers need an enterprise-grade replacement, right? Something with an HP badge on it, already tested in mission-critical environments. HP's Unix seemed to HP like a natural fit.

Not so fast, said a lot of the 3000 marketplace, the ones willing to migrate. Windows looks like what we already use on desktops, plus its costs less in capital acquisation expenses. (The operating costs are a whole other matter, depending on how good your Windows staff is.) Other Unix solutions knocked on the door of opportunity, too, the gate HP swung open with its "we're getting out of the 3000 community" announcement.

But HP-UX is more than Windows-calibre, as some migration sites can already attest. (Don't look for too many of them in the Ecometry e-commerce village, but the Summit credit unions are hip-deep in HP-UX.) HP-UX is deeper, richer, more tuned to a large-scale customer. So the HP-loyal sites got to work on HP-UX migration. HP has only made this solution better over those six years, but some of the improvement uses pretty old ideas, turned new again.

Remember Application Service Providers, from the 1990s? The ASPs were supposed to make 3000 ownership an infrequent option. HP even opened up its own ASP center, someplace in Idaho, for application firms to host upon.

Now the essence of ASP returns in Software as a Service (SaaS). Don't look for this in your MPE/iX bag of tools. ASPs never took off in the 3000 community, but SaaS might be a real reason to mount the big task of moving your computing away from a not-broken-anytime-soon HP 3000 environment.

HP says in its Is SaaS right for you? Web page:

Increasingly, organizations are turning to Software as a Service – a delivery model where applications are typically rented on demand, on a per-user basis.

IDC, the Framingham, Massachusetts research firm, estimates that the worldwide software-on-demand delivery model will reach $14.5 billion (U.S.) by 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate of 30 percent.

HP has always wanted to grow its business in services, but the costs have kept many a small to midsize business out of the range of that ramp-up. These solutions, however, keep getting pushed down to the rest of the IT customer base, the companies that are mulling Windows as an enterprise platform right alongside Unix.

Now that HP's Mercury Interactive and Opsware acquisitions are expected to generate sales, HP is giving customers a reason to consider their services. We first heard about HP's plans for these offerings in the summer at the HP Technology Forum. At the Speed Interviewing (think Dating) afternoon, HP's service offerings promised better and easier adoption of the ITIL standards. HP had a role in drafting these "how to organize an IT service" standards, which were just updated earlier this year.

SaaS is part of the new HP IT Service  Management (ITSM) solution that "helps IT organizations continually monitor, measure and improve their business value while increasing the efficiency of IT service delivery." The eager HP press kit promises that

The solution includes major enhancements to:

• HP Service Manager 7.0 – enables automated service lifecycle management to manage business services from a user perspective to help deliver higher quality services to the business at a lower cost. Problem detection and resolution can be accelerated through integrations HP Universal CMDB and HP BSM solutions. This is also offered through Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, with which customers can use software “on demand” over the Internet.
• HP Decision   Center 2.0 – helps IT staff manage and improve the quality of service delivery by helping IT organizations make informed decisions to improve business processes while minimizing negative business impact. It provides pre-configured metrics and analytics based on ITIL v3 to enable the business-centric measurements needed for continual service improvement.

There are ways to learn how to make use of this next-level IT design, via HP services and training.

• HP Blueprint and Training for Service Manager  7.0 – provides best practices for standardizing and automating processes to accelerate deployment of ITIL v3 and implementation of HP Service Manager. These services help customers improve the efficiency and quality of IT operations, ensure they meet regulatory reporting requirements and reduce operational risk.
• HP IT Service Management Assessment  Services – helps customers continually improve the quality of service management skills and processes. With enhancements that include the new ITIL v3 processes, this service helps improve productivity and reduce reactive process changes. This frees IT staff to focus more on strategic projects supporting business growth.

Seventeen summers ago, I cruised around San Francisco Bay with a boatload of journalists, all on the HP teat, eating and drinking and listening to press and analyst relations staffers from Hewlett-Packard. They were talking Computer Integrated Manufacturing back then, but the heart of the vision was making most of HP's money in offerings well away from operating systems and hardware. "Frankly, we'd like to make most of our revenues off services," said Charlie, who was boiling down the talk to the sound bites we needed.

SaaS and ITSM look like promising reasons to make a move beyond the HP 3000, if your company can handle the budget to adopt HP's Services role. A manager might be able to argue that if you're spending the money to migrate, getting more than a Unix copy of what's still working just fine, well, that would represent a real return on investment.

Early next week HP will give a Webcast on Service Manager 7, another component in its Business Technology Optimization offering. The Webcast is likely to be high-level (C-level language), so getting a CIO or VP in front of a browser could be useful. Sign up for the Webcast at the HP page. I recall a manager at a Southeast Texas manufacturer being happy about HP's migration push, because he could finally rewire the company's IT to keep up with growth. If this sounds like you, maybe BTO, ITIL, ITSM and SaaS can take places in your new computing picture.

Leaves and information fall faster here

The fall months brought far more than a change in weather and the colors of leaves. This season has served up many a transition for your community and the computer world as a whole, but none was so profound as the 3000’s Extra Two Years.

I was glad to have this online vehicle to keep up with the news all through October and into November. Not a bit of irony escaped me as I noted HP’s announcement date for a critical data corruption patch: Oct. 31, the day celebrated as a Worldwide Wake for the 3000 four years ago, the last day HP sold the system.

So now 48 months have passed, a full year of them beyond HP’s first “we’re getting out” date, and the community remains on the system in large numbers. About a third are already departed from your community, their migrations or replacements or re-hosting complete. But the rest of the user base needed those critical patches, those that HP announced primarily over the Web on newsgroups, Web sites and mailing lists. HP has sent word by way of the postal system, too. Quaint but comprehensive.

HP gave the NewsWire a cordial pre-announcement access to both news items. A full week in advance of the Mature Product Support announcement, I got a thorough briefing and a good while to ask questions. The patch releases were revealed to me just two hours before the rest of the world learned. Afterward, I got to pretend I was a newspaper reporter once again, working with a 90-minute deadline.

The best part was refreshing the HP Web page, minute by minute, on Oct. 31 to see when we could uncork our own coverage up on the blog, staying in tandem with HP's schedule. On that same afternoon we sent more than 2,000 e-mails to announce the story, a total maybe higher than the 3000 newsgroup and OpenMPE readership.

Not that I’d want to boast about all of our handling of the excitement. In a few days after HP’s critical patch announcement, I’d stumbled on the assumption that these binary-level patches had been less tested than the fully-integrated repairs HP usually General Releases. A friendly HP e-mail netted an hour of work to fix the errant stories, which were only posted to the blog on the prior day. Not a lot of community scrutiny surfaced over HP’s patches, but when Alfredo Rego and Stan Sieler pose queries, everybody in the community should listen up.

The news of the Mature Product Support came with an assurance that no patches will be developed after December 31, 2008. So your risk of running an HP 3000 will increase, HP figures. A month after the support extension, I asked if this kind of corruption patch, in binary form, would be among the kind that HP won’t develop during 2009. Nope. You can still expect this kind of critical repair, even during the “Without Sustaining Engineering (patches)” era of the Transition.

Those questions for both announcements, well, I got to ask them old-school over the telephone. Quaint, but comprehensive procedures. There has never been a better time to be a business and technology journalist, even with access drying up to companies' employees, officials and execs. Talk it up over the phone, add e-mail polish and review, then publish rapid over the Web. Information has never flowed faster here.

HP releases critical patches to prevent corruption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clock up patched support's value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But while the t