A week ago we spouted off in a podcast about the future of HP-UX, and haven't heard a word over the seven days since about any Itanium and HP-UX recant from Oracle. HP is adhering to its Itanium server roadmap, mostly because the company still sells three OS environments of its own design. Each runs only on Itanium/Integrity servers.

To be accurate, only HP-UX was built by Hewlett-Packard. NonStop and OpenVMS arrived at HP via acquisitions, so HP-UX remains the only OS on today's price list with classic HP genetics. It's also the only Hewlett-Packard OS that HP 3000 customers have used as a migration target. A look back at the fate of HP's operating systems shows a quite of charnel house of OS bones. Only IBM has put down a comparable number of good dogs in bad business circumstances, and Big Blue still supports its business OS's created in the 1980s and even earlier, the AS/400's OS/400 and the System Z for its mainframes.

Alan Tibbetts, a user group director at both Interex and OpenMPE and a 38-year veteran of HP 1000s, reminded us about several of these environments that HP gave up for dead besides MPE. "I must admit that I was amused by the articles saying that HP is pushing a 'private OS' with the webOS product that they acquired from Palm," he said. "Considering that they have killed Rocky Mountain Basic, RTE, MPE, HP-RT, and (any day now) HP-UX, I will have to see how much allegiance they really give to the concept of a proprietary OS."

The difference between things like Rocky Mountain Basic or RTE and MPE is that your OS is poised to move into its second decade running enterprises after HP has quit. But the HP OS history will remind even long-standing HP-UX users that their vendor-supported days are numbered.

Relying on HP for 3000 support is becoming a gamble and a gambit. One of the spots to place a bet is on an open forum run by Hewlett-Packard's support team. A recent quest for FTP techniques reveals yet another place where independent experts share MPE/iX answers.

The question was how to use FTP to ensure a safe backup of 3000 data. In this case it was a KSAM XL database, but the manager didn't know that his FAK files were HP's special Keyed Sequential Access Method database files. "What appears to be program files are moved over," he said, "but database files get left behind. How do I get these files over to our Windows server?" This 3000 is running MPE/iX 6.0, so there's more than just management experience missing from this server, since 6.0 is more than 10 years old.

One rule of 3000 operations is that database files act differently than all others in transfers. So FTPing them to a Windows 2003 server won't be a successful way to ensure a safe data recovery. (There are tools like Orbit Software's Backup Plus to do this, updated and supported in a way that STORE or HP's TurboStore subsystems will never be supported again.) But if a machine is stuck on 6.0, it's probably going to have only the budget to tap included HP software for file backups and transfers.

Donna Hofmeister, whose resume helping 3000 users occupies a vast chunk of the 3000-L newsgroup archives, suggests starting with mystd to store the files to disk -- then transfer the STD file. The advice arrived from a source that won't see a forced shutdown, or a portal migration, like HP's. The answers came from your community.

Some tools don't lose their edge, if sharp users sustain them. An old colleague noted the certain demise of the manual typewriter, a tool I used to break into journalism when the HP 3000 was entering its first heyday. The death watch for veteran tools often gets taken up by those who don't need them. They might not see how something can be both revered and useful, even at an advanced age.

Another kind of manual, at the left, arrived in our offices over the past weekend. The Series II/III HP 3000 System Reference Manual came off the bookshelf of Francois Desrochers, one of the NewsWire's charter subscribers. "I'm sure you'll take good care of it," he said in a handwritten note. The cursive script he used may not be taught any longer in a school near you. But that cursive is another information tool still revered and used by those who grew up with it.

HP's 3000 software products may not be a current choice to start any project in IT, unless it's a re-creation of the working data processing shop of the 1980s at the Computer History Museum. But if you need it and don't own it, the software is still available. Like a manual typewriter, these programs considered antiques still do unique tasks. For example, a few can talk to the 3000's registers for clues about solving errors. DEBUG is probably not the average 3000 owner's strong suit. It can be a comfort to know that like the manual above, somebody cares about and continues to care for it.

Migrations have been a constant concern for HP's enterprise system customers since 2001. Now the vendor is putting all of its computing customers into a transition with the upcoming shutdown of the IT Resource Center.

This web-based portal is the primary access point to HP's support services, delivering forums, support case submittal, software and driver downloads, patch management, product pages, guided troubleshooting, top issues, warranty and contract details, and software updates. Hewlett-Packard notified its customers last night that all of these features will be in the new HP Support Center -- and the ITRC which it replaces is closing on June 1.

The transitions involve access IDs and interfaces; the HP Passport logins are now mandatory, according to early notes from HP about the new portal. Customers won't be able to use apostrophes in their IDs any longer, even if those characters occur in their names. HP has promised "in June 2011 a migration tool will be available at the HP Support Center to help you migrate with ease. This will help to ensure that your access to our support resources is not interrupted."

Some portions of HP's support information are available to non-paying users of systems like the HP 3000. Customers have been assured that the HP Forum postings -- a kind of bulletin board for system managers -- will continue to be free. "Some features and content are available on HP Support Center without authentication," said support rep Kevin Paul, "but other features and content may require signing in and having an active warranty, HP Care Pack, or support agreement."

HP 3000 homesteaders have been cut off from buying HP's MPE/iX software or licenses for more than six months by now. But these programs -- tools written especially for the nuances of the 3000 -- might still be available to the community.

When OpenMPE emerges from its lawsuit challenge the group wants to resell the HP subsystem programs through an authorized deal with Client Systems. In the proposed arrangement, CS sells this software to OpenMPE, which marks it up 10 percent from half-off the price the HP was collecting. The deal would be one of the few ways the community might get a tangible way to support OpenMPE and receive something more than thanks for a contribution.

What's available among HP's subsystem products? HP kept updating things like the System Programming Tool (SPT) right up through its exit announcement of 2001. It patched the products in PowerPatches through 2006. SPT is a collection as well as analysis product, software that HP says "follows a collection-and-analysis approach to program tuning. During collection, sampling and tracing techniques are used to gather data. Analysis provides online reports used for evaluating the data."

SPT is among 16 products HP sold for development programmers on the 3000. The list includes the Architected Interface (AIF) tools required to hook into the operating system on the Privileged level. But some managers might already have some of this software on a SUBSYS tape for their 3000s, or on disk. Knowing where to look and what files contain the inventory is the first step in discovering what you might not need to purchase.

Does the future for HP's Unix sound like the 3000's past? No, it couldn't be the same. More than 140,000 customers use HP-UX and Oracle. The trouble is the second part of that recipe, now falling like a cake dropped out of an oven.

In our Weekend Podcast (11 minutes, 11 MB) we hear the sounds of the competition between Oracle and HP, which is getting hot as the summer hovers. So are the complaints from HP's Unix customers who need Oracle. Some of these luckless sites got shooed off MPE and the 3000, only to find that their new ecosystem on HP's Unix will be barren of Oracle before long. At least HP's got one stalwart database vendor to count on in the HP-UX environment --  a partner making a product that behaves like the 3000's IMAGE.

HP-UX customers who arrived at Oracle from HP 3000 migrations wonder if ceasing Itanium support will cost them their new OS. It wouldn't be the first HP operating system that Oracle has helped submerge, according to Terry Floyd of the Support Group.

The company Floyd founded is dedicated to a long HP 3000 lifespan. His son David predicts that MANMAN on the servers could last another 10 years, but the elder Floyd sees an Oracle cutoff as one of the forks down the harder road for MPE/iX.

"I think Oracle dropping MPE was one of the major nails in the coffin," Floyd said after a board of directors meeting of CAMUS, the user group dedicated to MANMAN on both MPE/iX and OpenVMS. That ERP software never made it to HP's Unix, although a rumor in the middle of last decade said its creators were considering such a port. Despite the nail, it was HP's exit announcement that stopped the vendor's 3000 future. But Oracle leaving MPE/iX probably contributed to a perception of a shrinking ecosystem for the OS. No one has made this shrinking claim yet for HP-UX.

Another 3000 icon has weighed in on the impact Oracle might have on HP-UX futures. Birket Foster of MB Foster said in a recent migration webinar he believes a sensible compromise might emerge as HP's customers push back on Oracle's plans.

Connect user group president Chris Koppe, a member of the 3000 community for more than 20 years, is leading a revolt of HP's Integrity server users against Oracle. The world's largest database vendor and the world's largest HP user group are in a fight over the future of customers' Integrity servers. Koppe reminds us that Oracle hit the customers first, and the user group wants HP's customers to hit back.

The dust-up between the largest vendor of enterprise servers and its biggest database partner began last month, when Oracle announced it was dropping support for the Itanium chipset -- and therefore, support for HP-UX, since that environment only runs on Itanium-based Integrity servers. The Oracle move is a competitive punch against customers who operate systems Oracle would like to replace with the Sun environment, Koppe said. Sites using HP's Unix -- as well as the NonStop and OpenVMS customers who also rely on Itanium -- need to push back to avoid needless expense.

"I don't think anyone at Oracle has thought this through from the customer's perspective," Koppe said. The Speedware marketing director has been part of Connect's campaign to rally HP customers against Oracle. Koppe's even posted a two-minute video address on YouTube to spark the customers' counter-punch. "The customer feedback we've heard has all been negative," he said. "I've heard a number of customers say they're going to do everything in their power to abandon Oracle."

While some people in the 3000 community await word of today's hearing on the lawsuit against OpenMPE, others consider a path going foward for the volunteers. They want to sell HP's 3000 software that's not available from the vendor any longer, reselling compilers, storage utilities and the like by way of Client Systems -- which bought licenses from HP to sell these products legally.

Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies suggests that resource might become an earner for the volunteers.

I do hope that OpenMPE does get to a point where they can be a reseller of HP's subsystem software. I'd love to pick up Mirror/iX and Glance/iX for several of my systems, and possibly a number of other bits and pieces. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

I'd also suggest that OpenMPE consider 'corporate' memberships, as well as personal ones, but at a cost -- and with that membership receive some sort of benefits.  Not sure what those could be - but something along the lines of visibility to other members (advertising?), or some such.

Hewlett Packard announced repairs to a pair of security holes in Unix this month. While nobody would call HP-UX holey as Swiss cheese, the alternative operating environment HP offers 3000 migrators needs something MPE/iX doesn't: Hewlett-Packard support. Both now, and well into the future.

The 3000's OS was left unimproved many times by HP over the last 10 years, even though more than half of that time it could remain under HP's support. MPE/iX didn't have this feature or that -- virtualization comes to mind first -- but it was always secure. If a customer chose to go independent of HP, you could count on less than two hands over a decade the times a security risk needed vendor intervention.

Once a month or more is the tally for HP-UX, an OS just as vendor-centric as MPE/iX. This time the hits to security came through both software common across vendors (BIND) and HP-specific (the Java in HP Network Node Manager i, or its NFS/ONCplus denial of service attack). There are patches online to use with HP's special patching software that's built-in to the OS. Every operating environment has these regular breaches. Well, except MPE/iX, which was stable enough HP never had to build a Patch-O-Matic designed to keep the system secure. That security device was called an operating system, back when HP sold the 3000.

The situation with things like SSRT100415 and SSRT100353 is important to this era while HP sells HP-UX to migrators, or doesn't, when a shop homesteads instead and sustains a 3000 operation. The homesteaders can pursue many years beyond HP's support life. Using Unix, or even Windows, is a dim prospect in any year after that OS vendor decides to leave the building. It's like the alkaline batteries we've all bought. They last a little longer, but when they quit, they're simply dead.

When the 3000 community started looking at means to move data from MANMAN systems to other servers, one advisor used a history lesson to remind managers about development fundamentals. Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies was replying to consultant Chuck Trites' message about data mover services. (Trites started with a note about how he'll move MANMAN databases can to SQL Server.)

This sort of data migration is an everyday task for some 3000 sites, especially those who operate more than one environment for ERP processing. Software is on hand from MB Foster, Speedware, Transoft and others to make these transfers. Edminster said that the software which drives MANMAN, Fortran, was a choice that ASK Systems made when COBOL was too green to use on a 3000.

"When ASK wanted to start development on MANMAN, the COBOL compiler wasn't ready yet -- but the FORTRAN 66 compiler was," Edminster says. "It was a 'time to market' thing -- where the belief was that they couldn't afford the potentially many months of wait-time until a stable enough COBOL compiler was ready. So MANMAN development began in FORTRAN 66, and then many years later, was upgraded to use of FORTRAN 77."

Edminster said the MANMAN design choices became notable to him when he was called in to "splice on a small legacy HR subsystem written in COBOL to a recently installed MANMAN implementation -- to share MANMAN's report routing and database access methods." This kind of data integration evokes lessons from Adager's Alfredo Rego and even deeper fundamentals about 3000-caliber management and development.

We want to use a Ricoh Afficio printer with npconfig on the HP 3000. However, we do have an HP LaserJet that could be used. What I recall hearing is that the Ricoh can work -- but the HP LaserJet, not being a foreign printer, would be easier to use. True?

Jeff Kell of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga replies:

If you are using real HP network printing without any third-party bells and whistles, the HP software is expecting to output something to a device along the lines of a JetDirect card or a networked Laserjet III/IV, and not much else. The 3000's MPE/iX generates fairly straightforward PCL output directed at TCP port 9100, has a rudimentary knowledge of SNMP status reports from a LaserJet/JetDirect. Later versions attempted some PJL handshaking in order to synchronize headers, print, trailers, and some error recovery.

So everything worked exactly as expected/planned, but for a very narrow window of time and hardware.

With that said, if you disable PJL (pjl_supported = FALSE), it eliminates many problems with earlier LaserJets and third party PCL-compatible printers, and now you're strictly dealing with fairly straightforward PCL.

In our latest email update on NewsWire stories we invited readers to share reports of Linux migrations, past or planned. While some say that larger migrations haven't appeared much for 3000-to-Linux, Ford Motors makes extensive use of Linux, and in a prior decade HP 3000s served at Ford.

We gathered more details from James Byrne of Harte & Harte Ltd., a 3000 site using the system in Canadian shipping brokerage. PowerHouse on an HP 3000 is a long way from the flexibility of Linux, but Byrne said the company has started a Linux rollout. The costs to experiment have been worth the journey, he says.

By James B. Byrne

We are presently rewriting all of our business application, currently implemented in Powerhouse on an HP 3000, to run as a web app on Linux-based servers. It has taken us far, far longer to get to this point than we imagined. But now we are actively rolling out functionality, albeit one small piece at a time.

We choose PostgreSQL for the backend store, Ruby as the programming language, and Ruby on Rails as the web application framework. We discovered that the most telling thing against using proprietary solutions is the ease with which we can experiment with -- and discard as unsatisfactory -- different software tools.

Stories of uptime are the limbs of legend in the 3000 forest. Companies stick with these servers, years after HP has shut down its 3000 business, because a 3000 can run for years without rebooting. (In contrast a few generations of OS ago, Unix designers at HP were happy that those systems "reboot real fast.") Reboots are not quite as critical in these days of virtual CPUs and provisioning. As application plans trigger a move to other platforms, some long-serving 3000s are being decomissioned. But a recent report from the field shows 3000 uptime is still measured in more than months.

Craig Lalley serves companies who are keeping 3000s in production. He reported that one system, a beefy N-Class 750, has been online since before HP closed its 3000 labs.

I noticed that I was still logged on the console (my session name). So I thought I would look, because I certainly do not recall when I would have done that.  Now I know what I was doing on Sept 26th at 12:29 am -- in 2008. Nothing special to see here, though.

There's not very much that's tangible about OpenMPE. No offices, no paid staff, no business model published to go along with its latest contribution drive. But a couple of HP 3000s running the mature Invent3K software suite -- well, that hardware and the accounts on it accessing HP's 3000 software, is as real as anything at the end of any IP address. What is Google really, but servers at an Internet address?

OpenMPE intended to give 3000 developers a place to create and test software for MPE/iX by hosting Invent3K. The servers at invent3k.openmpe.com will continue to do this. But as of April 30, the free trial accounts will be closed up. Access to the servers will be on a $99 yearly plan. The group is ready to take payments via PayPal, or "cheque or money order," according to treasurer Tracy Johnson.

Now that INVENT3K is up and running in production mode, OpenMPE's website now has a PayPal button so subscribers may send in their $99 yearly fee. For those that prefer to mail funds with cheque or money order, please send your $99 payment to: OpenMPE, Inc. P.O. Box 3524, Hampton, VA 25663-0524.

The precious HPSUSAN numbers, the IDs for all the remaining HP 3000s licensed in the world, are traveling into the future well. So reports Rene Woc, CEO of Adager and a 3000 icon who speaks with customers every day. The stability of HPSUSAN ownership is one measure of the community's ability to support itself sans HP.

Transferring HPSUSAN numbers, a unique one for each MPE/iX license, happens when a CPU board fails and must be replaced. Woc said Adager's client base is managing nicely, whatever means they're using.

"Over the last year I would say practically all customers have been able to keep the same HPSUSAN," he said. "So my impression is that the hardware providers or maintainers have [these transfers] figured out -- one way or the other."

One way to move the license numbers is to pay HP on a Time & Materials engagement, unless you're one of the few still paying for an HP support contract. The other way is to let an independent support company take care of the transfer as it supplies you the new hardware. Woc said customers are keeping their ways to themselves.

HP 3000 managers who still have migration in their future might be considering which HP platform to choose for such a major project. (Or not; often it's the application that guides such a choice.) But for a lift-and-shift or a rewrite, platforms play a major role. Hewlett-Packard is now defending an Oracle slap at the HP-UX Itanium world by revealing a census stat about customers.

Oracle became the largest application partner to leave the Itanium world when it announced it will end its database developments for Itanium. In a letter to the HP-UX user, HP has replied, "We have over 140,000 customers that are running Oracle on HP-UX and Itanium based Integrity servers, and we cannot walk away from this installed base."

While it's hard to know if that's a large number these days, the 140,000 is a rare thing: HP quantifying how many customers use a platform. The HP-UX number can be larger in other ways, with non-Oracle sites or those not using Itanium hardware. (Pretty rare, that last one.) The number becomes important to a 3000 manager who'll migrate because of HP's credo: "We cannot walk away from this installed base."

Developers who got this letter are starting to see handwriting on the wall for a long HP-UX future. To a lot of them who still know the 3000, that handwriting is written in disappearing ink. As for walking away from an installed base, the 3000 community knows all too well how it looks when HP takes its leave. How soon this will happen to HP-UX is a matter of not if, but when. HP's latest support matrix, issued last month, has end-dates that run to "no earlier than" 2017 for Montvale-based systems. Many are To Be Determined. But that environment's lifespan won't be dictated by HP any more than the vendor could number the days of MPE/iX.

It's the low-hanging prospects from worlds like the 3000 community that make up the rare new customer for HP-UX. HP needs the business, especially in the face of Oracle's sniping about Itanium futures.

HP made a good faith attempt to provide 3000 sites with enough tools to keep OpenSSL working on the platform. The pieces are inside the WebWise security suite A.04.00 that's part of MPE/iX. What's more, Beechglen has the OpenSSL 0.9.7d version of this cryptography software available to customers.

Even more experience with open source (the "Open" in OpenSSL) is available from Applied Technologies, which specializes in open source tools that relate to 3000 operations. But when it comes to support from an OS vendor, HP-UX is the only way to go to get the latest 0.9.8 version of the software. HP made its implementation and the support of it available last month as part of its March 2011 version of HP-UX 11i v3.

HP's taken to naming HP-UX revisions by their release date; the previous upgrade came out in September of 2010. What difference can one trailing digit of a three-digit release number make? Consider that the 1.0.0 version of OpenSSL, just out from the OpenSSL project, prevents an attacker from causing a crash (denial of service) by triggering invalid memory accesses. 1.0.0c is six releases more current than even what HP's got written for HP-UX 11i v3 March 2011.

This cat and mouse for mission critical security moves fast. Some managers like giving the responsibility for security to HP, since they're paying the vendor for support anyway. HP's not keen on supporting open source, more secure SSL versions that it hasn't built, however. That kind of support is what you pay a third party to manage on an HP 3000. SSL is a technology carriage that needs an expert driver. But paying for HP's implementation is just one way to go -- like getting a black box that ties you to a vendor. With the rise of Linux, the open in OpenSSL is getting more traction.

HP 3000 customers are used to rolling their own IT solutions. Many adopted the computer in the days when an in-house application suite, bolstered by tools that were spawned by user requests, made the DP department mission critical.

For some prospects in the 3000 community, Linux is feeling a lot like that custom-technology choice. There haven't been a lot of confirmed migrations to this version of Unix that's overtaking the HP and IBM and Oracle environments. But Chris Koppe of Speedware says it's a trend gaining traction.

"We have customers that have gone from HP 3000 to Linux, but it has been pretty rare," Koppe reported, which he briefed us on the open source COBOL-IT solution. "Only a few ISVs have done this; no big customers. That being said, we are seeing that there is a more frequent appetite for Linux as a target OS destination. It is definitely being viewed as a mainstream operating platform."

With most HP 3000s more than 10 years old by now, the internal components might be subject to failures. It doesn't happen often to anything but a disk, but any electronic part can go belly up on you. We liked the advice applied when a seasoned manager found his Network Interface Card (NIC) unresponsive on his 3000.

I have a NIC that appears to be down (no blinky lights).  When I tried to restart the LAN configured to it, I got the console message in reply to my restart command below:

/SYS/PUB%>NETCONTROL START;NET=LAN3

Encountered one or more errors while processing command. (CIERR 4436)

/SYS/PUB%>** NETXPORT Control Process : BUFFER MANAGER; Buffer manager error
- Loc: 45; Class: 2; Parm= $FFE300C9; PortID: $FFFFF78E

Does this appear to be software or hardware related? In other words, if I power down the HP 3000 and bring it back up, will the card wake up or remain dead?

Donna Hofmeister of Allegro replied:

Using NMMGR, check the configured packet size for the affected link. In particular, look for a packet size of 8224, which may indicate the NMCONFIG file has been corrupted, probably by an incompatible version of NMMGR. If the packet size is configured correctly, then depending on the error, it is possible too much frozen memory is being used by the system, but this can change with time. Use GLANCEXL or a similar utility to check memory usage by the system.

New HP CEO Leo Apothker's search for the company's lost soul has sparked a revival of the HP Way this week, when the company announced a return to the HP Way that created MPE, reskinned Unix, and bought VMS and NonStop. The four operating systems will enter a new group that's led by webOS, one that analysts are calling the Soul Group.

Apotheker, speaking at this week's America's Partners conference, introduced new vice president Bryan Humphrey as leader of the growth markets group built around HP's unique software environments. Even though nearly 10 years have elapsed since the company shucked off futures for the 3000's OS, Apotheker's drive toward an HP Way 2.0 will expand opportunities for the software so central to his company vision.

"HP has tremendous resources in its software intellectual property," Apotheker told a cheering audience in Las Vegas. "We've built the advantages a competitor cannot duplicate. We will eschew the mantra of Microsoft everywhere with millions of PCs and printers. Hardware comes and goes, but software lives forever."

One thunderbolt to the 3000 community came in the announcement of purchasing the SRNW emulator group, a skunkworks project that has been developing an MPE skin that runs on Intel hardware. Humphrey, whose background runs back to the HP Pinewood days of NewWave, said that PCs sit ready to take the 3000 OS into businesses. "Our CEO's search for the lost soul is over," Humphrey said from the stage of the Bellagio casino theatre. "There's nothing but opportunity left for our Deep Soul environments. We want to show the world what HP built, and then lost. We're driving these vehicles into the cloud and onto desktops.