HP transmitted a Security Bulletin for MPE/iX yesterday. Such a bulletin is a rare thing for the HP 3000, which is often protected by its unique architecture and design. But adopting an open source standard for Domain Name Services (DNS) has cut off the system, now that DNS caches are at risk.

The HP bulletin reports a security breech of BIND/iX, the software that has provided DNS for the 3000 since 1998. HP reports that the DNS cache poisoning of last year is permitted by BIND/iX 9.3.0, which is inside MPE/iX 6.5, 7.0 and 7.5, HP says. (You'll need a login and password to read the text off the HP IT Response Center Web page.)

DNS is not a widely-used service hosted on HP 3000s. When HP rolled BIND/iX out more than 10 years ago, it called DNS “a basic Internet service that’s been lacking from the HP 3000,” and noted that the addition will help sites bypass Unix or Windows systems and create all-3000 intranets.

But even if BIND isn't that important to the community, there's news in the Resolution part of the bulletin, which says,"The resolution is to discontinue the use of BIND/iX and migrate DNS services to another platform." This is as clear a message as any that the HP patch era for the 3000 has ended. Last year HP announced that it would not create any more patches for the 3000, starting in 2009 — not even patches for security risks.

As HP leaves the baseball field that is the 3000 community, it’s handing the ball over at the pitcher’s mound to some well-known, respected or dedicated third parties. These independent companies will dish out what the post-2010 user needs.

HP has been negotiating license agreements for hosting HP-written programs in the Jazz lineup of 3000 utilities, as well as the HP 3000 documentation. The vendor announced that Speedware and Client Systems have become HP licensees of 3000 materials from docs.hp.com and HP’s Jazz content.

Jennie Hou of HP says the vendor only recognizes a customer’s right to personal use of HP’s Jazz programs. HP says it has copyrights associated with HP-created Jazz programs. Re-hosting these Jazz files will require an HP license.

“We are talking to third-party providers that are interested in hosting some of the HP Jazz content on their servers,” she said. “In this scenario, [the content] is no longer a personal download for personal use anymore. Therefore, a license agreement to post this set of information is required, and it is a standard practice.”

In addition to the docs and the Jazz programs, Speedware is also hosting the Web-based migration training classes that have been offered on HP’s sites. HP is working to take the Web classes off the HP site now and expects the transfer to Speedware’s site to take place shortly. HP would like to have no gap between availability on HP’s site and the Speedware site.

Now that the HP 3000 Jazz Web server has been switched off at the HP labs, the dozens of technical white papers and documents created by HP 3000 engineers have gone to live inside other Hewlett-Packard Web sites, mostly in the support organization. HP is providing a guide to track down some of the content by name.

Customers can download a three-page PDF file, which includes live links to docs.hp.com and HP ITRC pages, at the following address:

docs.hp.com/en/15001/IndextoHPe3000-MPEiXContentFormerlyonJazz.pdf

HP was continuing to fine-tune the locations of Jazz documentation and information. Not all of the Jazz papers had an address at HP sites, according to the first release of the map. HP’s Jennie Hou reports that “Transition and Migration: Choosing the Best Tools and Services,” along with a paper on the latest Network Printing enhancement for MPE/iX 7.5, will be getting public access links in an updated version of the map. But most of the papers listed in the current PDF have an active link.

Even after the vendor gave the green light to source code licenses for MPE/iX, Hewlett-Packard refused to detail many specifics of what a licensee would receive from HP. At least a list of licensees will be released by mid-2010 for the source code agreements, the vendor now says.

“Given the successful negotiation of agreements with one or more third parties, HP will publish the names of those licensees in the first half of 2010,” it said in a statement on Jan. 22. The source licensees, who will get read-only reference access to some portions of the HP Fundamental Operating System (FOS), IMAGE and other subsystems, will be posted at the www.hp.com/go/e3000 Web page. But only when HP finalizes agreements with the companies.

HP said it hopes to “assist customers in making decisions about how to meet their technical support needs” once HP ends its 3000 support operations.

[Ed. Note: We asked the 3000 community to tell us if a 3000 hardware emulator, powered by the last release of MPE/iX, would be of any use in the years to come. Many said yes, or perhaps. But one 3000 customer from a Canadian shipping brokerage makes reasoned points for why strapping MPE onto new, faster silicon, plus carrying MPE-based solutions along, is a poor fit. We'll have more emulator responses in our February print edition, and on the blog afterward.]

By James Byrne

Here at Harte Lyne we have two HP 3000 918LX systems, primary and a hot spare at our off-site location. I have read the articles and commentary of last week and, even allowing for my profound dissatisfaction with HP, my reaction to them is “more of the same old-same old... divert, deceive and delay.” We are not considering using an emulator for our HP 3000. This decision is based on three considerations:

One, as pointed out, there is no such emulator. It is more than seven years since the EOL announcement for the HP 3000. If an emulator was going to appear then one reasonably expects that one would be produced by now. Two, HP has demonstrated an intractable institutional resistance to admitting that the HP 3000 was a viable platform despite their own 2001 assessment to the contrary. This has had, and cannot but continue to have, a baleful influence on efforts at cooperation with HP by those producing and intending to use said (non-extant) emulators.

Three, emulation is not enough. The world has moved on considerably since 2001, while MPE/iX has not. Basic FTP and Telnet are inherently insecure and increasingly discarded methods of data transfer. SSL with SHA2 or SHA512 encryption is a de facto, and in many instances a de jure, requirement for business data communication between hosts and even for inter-process communication on unsealed servers. Compiler-driven languages are all but completely replaced in new business application development by interpretive, and processor intensive, virtual machines (IVM) such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and so forth.

An MPE/iX emulator, given the OS’s dated capabilities, would be a hard sell for most company’s IT departments, even if it and the license transfer were free. Having to pay for either, and no doubt facing considerable third party fees to transfer licenses like Cognos and such, makes this path a non-starter in all but what can only be a very few extreme cases.

Emulating HP 3000 systems on non-3000 hardware has cleared a checkpoint. Hewlett-Packard will use its Right To Use (RTU) license to enable the 3000 community to run MPE/iX on non-PA-RISC hardware. The company will also offer a $500 license, for customers who don’t have licensed MPE/iX, to put the 3000’s OS on a system such as an Intel-based high-end server.

HP plans to use its existing Software License Transfer process to move RTU licenses from HP 3000s to non-3000 hardware for emulation. The SLT transfer carries a $400 fee today.

HP says that that platform emulator products  — if any emerge — need to run on “HP licensed products.” These products will provide a new platform to host the environment that runs software designed to operate on an HP 3000.

The vendor hasn't worked out the agreement terms between itself and potential emulation vendors and did not want to discuss what's still in play. HP won't comment on which companies it is negotiating with, either.

Hewlett-Packard has released its final advisories to the community members who will continue using the HP 3000 after HP’s support for the 3000 ends. A trio of HP documents are available today at the vendor's e3000 Web page. While HP's support ends Dec. 31, 2010, there are a few HP services that will continue well beyond that date.

Most important to the community is the CPU and system rescue service, that software-to-hardware blessing which can change HPCPUNAME and HPSUSUAN numbers for replacement 3000s. When a CPU board dies, or a system needs to be updated at a fundamental level, Hewlett-Packard still owns the only software that can transform replacement hardware into your hardware, complete with reinstated numbers that allow third-party programs to run unfettered.

This use of SS_CONFIG (for the system up to 900 Series vintage) or SS_UPDATE (for the ultimate models of 3000s) will cost a customer on a time and materials basis, but HP plans to offer these reconfigurations of stable storage for an undetermined period. The services will be performed by HP Support. No pricing has been announced for this effort that keeps a 3000 running after a failure.

HP now considers its customer communication to the post-2010 community complete. "We at HP believe we have responded to and addressed all of the HP e3000 end-of-life requests our customers and partners have made in recent years," one document states.

HP has given us an advisory that it will post new Web pages today about its post-2010 HP 3000 practices. During October and November, the company gave the community notice when these pages went live through messages to the HP 3000 newsgroup and OpenMPE mailing lists.

Hewlett-Packard has been posting these post-2010 communications at the www.hp.com/go/e3000 Web page, usually through a link at the top of the page. These January announcements will be the last of three communications HP promised about end-game issues for the platform. The vendor closed down its lab and development operations for the server on Dec. 31.

Check back with us here later today for a report on what HP has decided.

At last week's 2009 National Retail Federation Show, a former 3000 application stalwart poked forward with a new year of e-commerce enhancements, such as processing all transactions as XML exchanges. Ecometry/Escalate was at the show and was "continuing to roll out their merchandising products" at the expo, according to MB Foster's founder Birket Foster, who attended the New York City meet. But while those new Escalate products won't operate on HP 3000s, the most crucial commerce development might be best practices, Visa's new rules that Foster noted in a report after the show.

Visa announced a new set of Payment Acceptance Best Practices last fall, a code of conduct that will be much tougher to accomplish using the HP 3000 version of the Ecometry retail/commerce applications. Existing businesses will be grandfathered in for a time by Visa, Foster said, "but if you wanted to start a new business and wanted to use Visa, you'd have to have software that's doing things BAPB-compliant. You have until July 2010 to have moved [to the new practices]. Given that it takes six to 18 months to move, most of these [Ecometry] people need to start thinking how they're going to move off the 3000."

These customers will find that their HP 3000s won't be certified by Visa in 2010, "and they'll just revoke your license," Foster said. Once again, there's an escape path that involves third parties, as is common in the 3000 community.

In the US we're making history today by inaugurating a black President. History has become a major part of your community by now — HP has shuffled all non-support 3000 operations to its history books, customers manage 3000s used only for historic look ups, and volunteers work on a historic transfer of information.

Today might be a good day to rededicate your strategy for HP 3000 ownership. The companies who have migrated still face the enhancement phase of their transition. Moving away from a working, stable platform was sparked by HP and its exit from the market. Asset mangement firm ING Australia moved off its two HP 3000s because of HP's termination of support. ING wants to get more from its suite of applications than a new platform, though.

Homesteaders can be working on aging infrastructure, just as the US needs to do starting today. There are more companies still running HP 3000s than you might imagine. "Many dozens if not hundreds of clients are still on the platform seven years later," reports James Mulcahy, formerly of Ecometry/Escalate, suppliers of e-commerce and retail apps. "They have not made the migration to Windows-based systems."

Meanwhile, the thousands of files of programs, reports and instruction that were hosted on HP's Jazz server are working their way to an independent home at OpenMPE. The free public development server Invent3k is making a transition, too. "OpenMPE is working on making our own Invent3k available," said director Donna Hofmeister this morning.  "Much of Jazz's contents will be available via this system."

An HP 3000 customer finds fewer user group choices in this era. In addition to a host of regional HP groups, Interex operated for three decades before self-destructing in the shadow of a new HP Technology Forum conference. The VMS group Encompass took HP's offer to organize the content of the new Forum — with HP's steady influence — and then the user group took the reins of the Joiners and Meeters among the 3000 world.

Then last summer Encompass allied with two other user groups to form Connect. The aim was to increase membership ranks, and with that increase hold HP's attention. That's a hard mission to proclaim as accomplished. It's easier to see how the Connect spirit started a new Euro conference last fall and revamped its Web site. As you can see from the form at left, there's still a way to show your 3000 colors to the Connect online community.

This week I got my membership renewal notice for Connect, perhaps like some other HP 3000 members who earned a free year of membership by attending the November 2007 Community Meet by the Bay. Encompass gave a free year to every attendee. Midway through my year, the group had created a social networking experience as part of new Web focus.

As a way of staying in touch with experts who know target platforms and technologies for migration, joining Connect seems like a good strategy for me. You might find that you want technical content from the group, too. There's a discount to attend the annual Tech Forum and some other benefits of membership. But in an era when more people than ever network online, you might judge the value of Connect in its Web pages.

That's one of the things which makes the renewal notice an anachronism. Even from the Web site, you must fill out a Word document and fax it to the Connect offices to remain a member. (Perhaps because the form holds a space for credit card information.) It's a minor point, perhaps, when you consider that the membership is only $50 a year. But an online renewal seems more in style with a mission of connection.

It's been seven years since HP announced there would be no faster 3000s. Early in the transition era the homesteading advocates in the community pumped up the ideal of an emulator, hardware that would make up for the 3000s which HP would be stripping out of its product lineup. At the time the talk served little more purpose than to give the homesteaders a cause to rally around. The new generation of 3000s was twice as fast as the Series 900 predecessors, fast enough for a good while.

But more than 80 months have passed and computing power requirements have rolled upward. The market learned that the newer generation of 3000s was better connected and faster, but few in number. HP's late delivery of the N-Class and A-Class hampered production. If you needed a faster 3000 than the top-end 900 Series, you hunted for N-Class servers that customers were returning once they migrated.

Now the climate and demand has changed for faster 3000 compute power, but there's no relief from HP on the horizon. Staying with MPE/iX solutions means a customer needs to keep planning for more connectivity and speed. An emulator that can leverage the latest Intel chip designs, rather than flog the familiar PA-RISC architectures of HP, might find a market by next year.

Why next year, rather than, say, 2004? The used 3000s of five years ago ran fast enough to replace MPE/iX systems and justify the investment. Now only a rare, 4-way N-Class offers that kind of power leap. And there's nothing built upon PA-RISC that can network and integrate like an Intel-based server. The irony of that reality is not lost on the 3000 customer, who saw the Intel/HP generation of 3000 first promised, then denied to the community.

Michael Anderson, one of the independent support providers and contract developers in the 3000 community, posed a question: How can you get the 3000's spooler output into shape for use in Microsoft Word?

There's an answer among the third party tools, yes; Hillary Software’s product, ByRequest. The product will pick up spoolfiles from the HP 3000 and convert them into Word or Excel format. But what if your 3000 budget is as tamped down as the stock market? You'd be looking for something created by the community.

Dave Powell has your answer. He's built a command file called hp2rtf, tapping the Rich Text Format that's a little-used but powerful bridge for Word document exchange.

It's the middle of January and the final update from Hewlett-Packard about the 3000 end-game is due. Regardless of how much help a source code license might provide, customers are going to need something more crucial to keep 3000s running in the period beyond the end of the PowerPoint chart at left. HP showed off the chart in the fall of 2006, and the vendor seems certain to cut off its 3000 operations by the end of 2010.

For many 3000 owners, HP's exit from the support legions has little impact. We estimate that a majority of the long-term users of the system are already signed on and happy with their third-party providers, many of whom have deeper knowledge of most issues than the HP support staff which is now the steward of all things 3000 at HP.

There's one tool, however, that HP has withheld from its post 2010 release: The software to reconfigure HP 3000 CPUs and system boards. In the event of a fry-out or similar disaster, or just an upgrade, the legitimate HP software will need to be available to the customers in 2011. Not just homesteaders, either, but the migration sites still moving off the platform.

ScreenJet's Alan Yeo put it succinctly: This kind of change to HPCPUNAME and HPSUSAN numbers needs to remain on HP's price list, regardless of what the vendor wants to charge.

COBOL vendor Micro Focus announced that it supports the Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud Platform. Micro Focus calls the support Enterprise Cloud Services, and it said the support continues a "cloud agnostic strategy" for COBOL apps.

This strategy allows customers to choose how and when they want certain applications to reach the cloud. Micro Focus previously announced support for Microsoft’s Azure Platform and will continue to partner with key cloud vendors to maximize customer choice.

Amazon's EC2 platform is another means to implement a cloud computing infrastructure, a solution that can save money on implementation. Micro Focus said being "cloud agnostic" could save millions as cloud adoption grows. Cloud support is a function that homesteading HP 3000 sites can't access through a COBOL suite.

The economy's swoon has had an effect on spending everywhere. IT is no exception, and the impact manifests itself in scheduling and milestones. A project which was going to take 18 months is revised for twice as long, or a start date is pushed back by a year to use funds from a different and more robust fiscal period.

The good news is that a delay in a migration might not be such a bad idea, when you consider the value proposition. So long as that HP 3000 is still working well enough, then Micheal Anderson of J3K Solutions, another single-expert solutions and support provider, has made a case for later rather than sooner.

Anderson has been working on migrations for 3000 sites. But right away is not the right schedule for everybody, he said.

All across a MacWorld that even the New York Times described as strange, I saw an unusual trend on the expo floor. Dozens of companies were offering products that could only be used by businesses.

No fewer than 10 suppliers offered RAID or networked attached storage solutions. Backups into clouds and offsite storage even came from Iron Mountain, a company pretty well known for serving Unix and Windows customers. Iron Mountain arrived here in San Francisco for the show with its first Mac OS agent for its encrypted backup and data retrieval software.

And not a single supplier of mobile computing has the breadth of apps that Apple's solution offers. CRM pushed down to a phone with expert synchronization has emerged on a device with an Apple on its face. Yes, the iPhone. Postage and shipping options included a solution (at left) that prints labels ready for overseas shipments, so a mailroom staffer could skip the post office lines.

An alliance of a half-dozen companies pulled together in one 40-foot booth to sell administration and system management, backup, virtualization and more. One of the companies' VPs said he hoped that next year's conference would include some segregation, because he wanted a business section of the show floor to make contact with enterprise customers and medium-sized businesses.

In the HP marketplace, and in the 3000 community in particular, the Mac and its Unix-based OS may never escape the "not-Windows" ghetto where it lives, courtesy of outdated views. Apple is the company which makes billions off of music and phones. But on the other hand, HP makes billions selling ink and cameras and even flat-screen TVs. What makes a vendor a serious choice for serious business computing is the selection and standards available. Migration candidates in the 3000 market would do well to come here next January and see business exposed. Perhaps not directly alongside the booths selling iPhone cases, though.

From our "Where Are They Now?" series

Vladimir Volokh has maintained his pace of travel through the HP 3000 community, even as this legend of the computer's software field turns 70 this year. The founder of VEsoft called to remind us that the HP 3000's date intrinsics will outlast those in Unix, so long as a program uses HPCALENDAR — correcting a detail he spotted in our printed 3000 NewsWire issue from November.

This month Vladimir will start his 30th year of travels through his base of customers. He carries printed copies of the NewsWire on the regular maintenance consulting which remains the backbone of his business life. He loves to visit a site for a single day of instruction, repair and maintenance of the 3000 and its administrators. January will find him on the road to North and South Carolina for three weeks.

Logfiles are his latest target for cleanup. "Either they always have too many of them, or they have too little. The customers never know what they log, or how to read them. I would say they lose millions of sectors of space to logfiles, but nobody looks at them, so they don't know." But last month, for the first time, Vladimir found an HP 3000 which didn't have any logfiles. Logfiles are useful for 3000s, especially to assist in security. And it's difficult to erase all of them. But as the saying goes, you can make a system foolproof, but not-idiot proof.

 This was the month that Apple left its community to accomplish the work. At this year's MacWorld Apple talked very little about its hardware and operating environment. For a conference that VP Philip Schiller said was "all about the Mac," not much was revealed about hardware or the operating environment, those things that make up the heart and soul of a computer. The news at this annual show from the vendor revolved around software suites called iLife and iWork, as well as the cost of music and a new laptop. It was the first MacWorld without a Steve Jobs address in 10 years, and the lack of dazzle could be felt and found all through the halls and the media reports.

But just because the vendor here is focused on other business opportunity doesn't mean the Mac world isn't growing its enterprise abilities. Apple's attitude toward enterprise Mac use has been a lot like HP's approach to using 3000s through the 1990s. "We know the customers use our products for these classic business needs, but we're more involved in products that touch millions." Consumer is the siren call, both then and now. You could have said it about HP as it pursued the PC business during the late '90s, or about Apple today, shining its light on games and mobile applications that can run on millions of iPhones.

Meanwhile, back in the deeper reaches of the Moscone Center, Apple's third parties serve the needs of business owners and large organizations using the Mac. It's easy to forget that under its skin, the Mac OS is Unix, the same base environment HP promotes for business users. You get a peek at that Big User community when you see something like Network Attached Storage vendors offering complete RAID 5 implementations. Promise Technology rolls out a new NAS unit with 4 TB of RAID storage for $700 here, and one of the two major implementations is for site backups.

The other side of the Promise user base is media producers and consumers. At a HP trade show you wouldn't find a 50-inch flatscreen running a movie delivered off a 4-bay Direct Attached Storage unit. Product manager Billy Harrison said the company was proud to have solved the challenge of showing video at speeds that match the movie-in-a-theatre experience.

So is MacWorld for music and movie freaks, or admins who need to steward a corporation's licenses and configurations across dozens to hundreds of client systems? It's both, but Apple's gaming and media focus and phone-pumping message just shows the vendor can only embrace one kind of customer at a circus like this one.

Last year we took note of the HPCALENDAR intrinsic and its ability to create accurate timestamps for decades to come on the HP 3000. The intrinsic isn't new, though, even though HP advised its customers in November to begin using it on HP 3000s.

No, HPCALENDAR harks back to version 5.5 of MPE/iX. Its power lies in the 3000 for use by programmers who want accurate dates beyond 2038 for application files. But the operating system itself? It continues to use the old CALENDAR intrinsic, which only gives an accurate timestamp to 2027.

Is it foolish to be considering the timestamping ability of a 3000 some 19 years into the future? HP must have thought so while it made technical decisions for this system over the past seven years, knowing the vendor would step out of the 3000 community. You see, HPCALENDAR was never integrated into the operating system itself.

Now, with the 3000's development labs closed down, the community can wonder who'll keep the calendar functions up to date for MPE/iX.

Many of us in the 3000 community are adjusting calendars today. Jan. 5 might be your first day back at work, whether that's in an office with a company or returning to your independent desk in whatever room you designate at a workplace. With 2009 already upon us, and a journalist's penchant for looking ahead, I'll make a stab at predicting some trends and developments our the new year.

HP keeps a toehold in the community. It seems logical to imagine that HP announces an ongoing licensing facility for MPE/iX. Even though the vendor's support operations will cease in less than two years, companies will continue to need to revive CPU boards in the event of failures. HP won't let SS_UPDATE (for the newer 3000s) or SS_CONFIG into the third party supporters' shops.

An emulator for PA-RISC goes into a beta test. SRI, based in Switzerland and a producer of Digital emulators, has had a project in play since 2004. Strobe Data, based in the US, has also announced a emulator project. 2009, perhaps late in the year, might be a likely target date to start gathering field test data. An emulator becomes important to any customer who needs 3000 horsepower increases or support (via Intel host CPUs) for peripheral or networking stack elements.

It's been seven years since HP announced there would be no faster 3000s. Early in the transition era the homesteading advocates in the community pumped up the ideal of an emulator, hardware that would make up for the 3000s which HP would be stripping out of its product lineup. At the time the talk served little more purpose than to give the homesteaders a cause to rally around. The new generation of 3000s was twice as fast as the Series 900 predecessors, fast enough for a good while.

But more than 80 months have passed and computing power requirements have rolled upward. The market learned that the newer generation of 3000s was better connected and faster, but few in number. HP's late delivery of the N-Class and A-Class hampered production. If you needed a faster 3000 than the top-end 900 Series, you hunted for N-Class servers that customers were returning once they migrated.

Now the climate and demand has changed for faster 3000 compute power, but there's no relief from HP on the horizon. Staying with MPE/iX solutions means a customer needs to keep planning for more connectivity and speed. An emulator that can leverage the latest Intel chip designs, rather than flog the familiar PA-RISC architectures of HP, might find a market by next year.

Why next year, rather than, say, 2004? The used 3000s of five years ago ran fast enough to replace MPE/iX systems and justify the investment. Now only a rare, 4-way N-Class offers that kind of power leap. And there's nothing built upon PA-RISC that can network and integrate like an Intel-based server. The irony of that reality is not lost on the 3000 customer, who saw the Intel/HP generation of 3000 first promised, then denied to the community.