Bloggy bits on several fronts
April 2, 2009
Clearing the decks here with a few news items of note for the 3000 customer:
• IBM might axe an HP-UX competitor. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Big Blue continues to pursue a deal to purchase Sun Microsystems. But if an acquisition takes place, one of the casualties could be Solaris, the Unix flavor that competes with HP's Unix and IBM's own AIX. Sound familiar, HP 3000 users of MPE/iX? The IBM move would benefit the lifespan of HP-UX, which HP will support and extend only as long as it contributes revenues and profits and attracts customers. Those were the rules for the HP 3000, after all. At present, HP has given a guarantee of 2016 for HP-UX, for whatever such promises are worth.
• Staying with HP 3000 alternatives, Texas has outlawed Vista. At least in government. The state senate down here (our offices are in Austin) gave preliminary approval to a state budget that includes a provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Microsoft's Windows Vista without written consent of the legislature. Sen. Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat from McAllen and vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because "of the many reports of problems with Vista." Vista is a desktop environment, but a piece of the enterprise solution which Microsoft continues to see as vital. (On the other hand, we kill things off in Texas faster than any other state.)
• 3000 advice and tech help resurfaced on the 3000 newsgroup. Once a vast collection of wizardry that dished out 2,000 messages a month, the 3000-L mailing list and newsgroup weathered a six-day stretch without a single bit of tech advice. A score of Off Topic messages floated up about US politics, but the group has never seen so long a period with so little help offered.
To be fair, everything on the 3000 newsgroup is a voluntary effort, generous contributions from the seasoned vets of the MPE/iX world. But customers and community members usually ask questions to spark the rich advice on the group. Perhaps nobody needed help with a 3000 for close to a week. We have counted only 435 on-topic messages for the full 2009 year so far on the group, compared to the lush days before HP announced its 3000 exit. (Of those 435, 35 were testimonials to the late, great Wirt Atmar.) The stretch was broken at last yesterday, when advice emerged on how to add a UPS to an N-Class HP 3000.
Documentation on the configuration was proving to be elusive on the HP Web site.
Gilles Schipper, our homesteading editor, gave directions up on the newsgroup about how to connect the two devices and run Monitor/iX on the 3000:
The UPSUTIL manual is available in PDF format at docs.hp.com/en/14249/upsutil.pdf
Donna Hofmeister of the OpenMPE board added