HP 3000's extended time gets posted
November 1, 2006
Hewlett-Packard — and especially the friends of MPE/iX inside the company's lab — are readying the HP 3000 for a future which the vendor never planned to support.
This week HP posted a notice of a replacement copy of a file HP 3000 customers will need next spring, when Daylight Saving Time expands to four more weeks of the year, a change in law beginning in 2007. Yes, 2007, the year that HP planned to be finished with the 3000 support tasks.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see tasks like this file replacement popping up on HP's 2007 and 2008 to-do lists. Major work? Not really. Crucial to the smooth ride you've come to expect from 3000 ownership? Yes indeed.
HP has already made the new file available from its Jazz Web site, months before it's needed. Now the customer will be able to manage time changes in early March, and early November, of a year when the majority of customers were supposed to be migrated. Perhaps by next November the time of a majority of 3000 sites migrated will have arrived.
For now, the file TZTAB.LIB.SYS has an update waiting at the Jazz site. It contains the new US 2007 Daylight Saving Time rules The link straight to the download page is jazz.external.hp.com/TZTAB/
HP engineer Bill Cadier reports HP's going to fix the problem for all three supported versions of the 3000's operating system:
There will also be an official patch called LBCMXX4 versions A, B and C for 7.5, 7.0 and 6.5 respectively. I anticipate that these three versions will be available on the ITRC by around November 15. Once they are available, the Web page on Jazz will be updated to reflect that.
There is absolutely no difference between the TZTAB you get from Jazz and the one delivered by the patch and all the patch will do is replace the TZTAB file. The patches were created for those folks who prefer that delivery mechanism.