By Brian Edminster
Applied Technologies

First in a series 

In the beginning, there was tape. And if you’ve been around awhile, you remember it was on big reels about a foot across, was about a half-inch wide, and could have as much as 2400 feet of it on a reel. Yeah, they were heavy, too.

Data was recorded in parallel ‘tracks’ along the length of the tape. In this case nine of them, hence the name ‘9-track’ tape. At 800 bpi, that yielded a capacity of nearly 20Mb. Later technology allowed higher density, when 1600 bpi upped that capacity to about 120Mb. The last incarnation of 9-track was a whopping 6250 bpi — yielding nearly 1Gb of storage for a single reel of tape.

By comparison, anyone can get USB flash-drives that’ll hold 16Gb for $10 down at Walmart. 

Very few, if any later model 3000’s (those that run MPE/iX vs. MPE/V) will even have a 9-track tape drive on them. And that’s a good thing. These 9-track tapes take up far too much physical storage space, and are far too slow to read and write. They might have been okay, back when disk drives were 50Mb, 120Mb, 404Mb, or even 570Mb (the capacities of the old HP 7920, 7925, 793x, and 7937 disk drives, respectively).

Unfortunately, a 2Gb drive is pretty much the smallest drive you’ll see on a 3000 these days, and larger drives are more common. This presents a problem: What do you do when it takes potentially dozens of tapes — and many hours — to do your daily backups?

Whether a 3000 customer is hanging in there for good business reasons, or heading off to another platform, they all need testing skills. Retirements and workforce reductions contribute to the loss of those disciplines. One advantage of making a migration is a refreshed demand for testing. After all, changing environments means measuring the effects of those changes.

During a recent online presentation about migration practices, the scope of that underestimation was revealed. Figure on three times the amount of resource for testing, experts say, as you'd initially budget. About a third of the cost and time to make significant changes of applications or an environment should go into testing. The lucky part of that costly equation is that at least on enterprise systems, you can work to replicate bugs.

Touchpad interface developers are not so lucky. Give a user an infinite number of ways to touch a screen, swipe it, pinch it or tap it. Then when an app crashes, try to replicate the exact combination of user interface actions. Testing, says Allegro's co-founder Steve Cooper, is much more complex in that world of BYOD apps.

Complex testing is an artifact of the rising art of systems. Where the HP 3000 can guarantee that programs written in 1978 would run in 2008, the 2010 iPads cannot run software built less than two years later. Testing is costly, and remaining in place on a platform like the 3000, for business reasons, reduces the need to do it. When you do go, an HP 3000 expert might be out of their depth in juggling development tools of Java, Ruby or even iOS -- but some of those veterans know testing disciplines better than any recent graduate, offshore, or near-shore programmer.

One of the leading lights in HP 3000 development has been researching how to port software to Posix under MPE/iX. David Dummer, who created DataExpress and played a major role in making Transact a genuine language, was looking for help to resolve an error while compiling.

Why would a 3000 homesteader want to port software to Posix? One reason is to ready an application for the journey to one of the *nixes, like HP-UX or Linux. Here's Dummer's dilemma.

I have been trying for some days to port a Unix application to an HP 3000. One of the source files contains calls to the Posix functions of 'tcgetattr' and 'tcsetattr' for terminal handling control. I compile this source under the Posix shell, as the MPE C compiler doesn't appear to be able to find the included 'termios.h' header file. The application program is then created by the MPE linkage editor.

At execution time the loader denotes the two Posix functions as unresolved externals. From my reading of articles on Porting to Posix I would have expected these two functions to be in the relocateable library file '/lib/libc.a' 

I then decided to write a makefile and to perform all of the compile and build functions under the Posix shell. This appears to cure the missing function problem, but the resulting application aborts before reaching the first statement in the mainline program.

Mark Bixby, who wrote that seminal resource on porting to MPE applications to open source, weighed in with some advice for developers.

Over the last three business days, the world's investors and computer customers have watched results of a radical slenderizing program. Hewlett-Packard is taking its early steps on the treadmill to becoming a leaner provider. Its most radical move just resulted in shedding all of its profits for the quarter that ended in July. HP's going to sweat out its extra weight, one 90-day period at a time.

This time around it was HP Services that forced Hewlett-Packard to drop pounds. The vendor had been eager to jump into lucrative outsourcing business since early in the previous decade. After the board of directors killed off Carly Fiorina's plan to acquire Price Waterhouse Cooper, a few years later EDS became a part of HP, at a price of $14 billion. Writing off $8 billion of that outsourcing business as lost goodwill just pushed HP's earnings into the red.

HP's numbers showed that it was  the first time in more than a decade that HP put red ink on the bottom of its balance sheet. It was the largest loss HP ever recorded in a single quarter, and only the third in the company's history. But the $4 per share loss was a sign that HP's slenderizing is serious. Its CEO Meg Whitman has said the company needs to do less, in the hopes of doing what remains even better. 

These are the kinds of reductions that have been overdue at HP, a company which still wants to supply the 3000 migrator with a Unix -- or increasingly so, a Linux -- replacement for MPE environments. If there are customers out there who remain undecided about their migration details: target environments, deadlines or even architectures, then the slenderizing is important. A company getting thinner in the enterprise business, for example, would not be a secure choice while making a change. IBM's not reducing its enterprise measurements, for example.

But you do want a leaner HP, if you're sticking with this vendor. You just don't want it to lose the muscle of enterprise computing, the datacenter tech business, while it gets smaller. Today HP's stock closed at $17.21. You have to go back more than nine years to find a close that's lower, back in the 2002-03 era when the business world was digging out from 9/11's disasters. HP's market cap has slimmed down to just 5 percent of Apple's, and 15 percent of IBM's.

In 2012, it's a tougher world out there for an IT pro. We’ve heard from business analysts that the best thing for any of us over 50, upon getting furloughed, laid off, or Work Force Reduced, is to open our own business. For some, it's a better chance to work than to be hired again. 

HP’s cutting 27,000 jobs over the next two years. Some extraordinary skill in HP enterprise business servers is leaving the company.

Bob Chase started with MPE in 1987 and came to HP in 1996. He extended his skills to land a place as an HP Business Recovery Specialist, part of HP’s support group out of the Atlanta area. “In 2010 I was offered a position as a hardware BRS for Superdomes, blades, and all the Integrity and PA-RISC platforms,” he says. “It was quite a challenge, as I took 35 internal HP hardware courses over four months and began working calls." But after making a transition to Superdome and HP-UX support, he’s had to leave his employer.

After 16 years at HP, I was Work Force Reduced in early June. I loved supporting the 3000, as my first computer job was as a Computer Operator making $4 per hour at my dad's employer. I was 19 years old. It was a Series 68. 

Considering the IT world of today compared to the late 80's, I have great doubt that my career path could be realized today. Off-shoring, consolidation and mergers make it a greater challenge than ever before.

Chase has opened up Chase for Hire, an independent consultancy. He believes that MPE “was an OS that left the enterprise too early.” And regarding prospects for Itanium and HP-UX, an industry-standard path to the future, away from Integrity, seems clear. There's an echo of MPE's later lifespan in the future for Unix. HP has spread more talk of Linux for the enterprise now.

Industry Standard Servers are the future as of 2012. Commonality for the enterprise seems to be paramount, more than a vendor specific/proprietary OS solution. Linux flavors will be the benefactor from this. 

By Steve Hardwick, CISSP

Second of two parts

Once you have created good passwords, your next challenge is how to remember them all. Some of the passwords I use I tend to remember due to repetitive use. The password for logging into my system is one I tend to remember, even through it is 11 characters long. But many of my passwords I use infrequently -- my router for example, and many have the “remember me” function when I log on.

What happens when I want to recall one of these? Well the first thing is not to write them down unless you absolutely have to. You would be amazed how many times I have seen someone password taped on the underside of their laptop. A better option is to store them on your machine. How do you do that securely?Well, there are several ways.

One easy way is to use a password vault or password manager. This creates a single encrypted file that you can access with a single username and password. Username and password combinations can then be entered into the password vault application together with their corresponding account. The big advantage is that it is now easy to access the access data with one username and password.

The one flaw: what happens if the drive crashes that contains the vault application and data? If you wanted to get started with a password vault application, InfoWorld offered a good article that compares some leading products.

Editor's Note: Security is one of the limiting factors in adopting cloud computing. HP, as well as its partners, will tell you that cloud computing and similar remote access is a forward-thinking alternative to HP 3000 centralized on-site computing. But there's that security thing.

More than 30 years ago VEsoft's Eugene Volokh chronicled the fundamentals of security for 3000 owners trying to protect passwords and user IDs. Much of that access hasn't changed at all, and the 3000's security by obscurity has helped it evade things like Denial of Service attacks, routinely reported and then plugged for today's Unix-based systems. Consider these 3000 fundamentals from Eugene's Burn Before Reading, hosted on the Adager website.

Logon security is probably the most important component of your security fence. This is because many of the subsequent security devices (e.g. file security) use information that is established at logon time, such as user ID and account name. Thus, we must not only forbid unauthorized users from logging on, but must also ensure that even an authorized user can only log on to his user ID.

If one and only one user is allowed to use a particular use ID, he may be asked to enter some personal information (his mother's maiden name?) when he is initially added to the system, and then be asked that question (or one of a number of such personal questions) every time he logs on. This general method of determining a user's authorizations by what he knows we will call "knowledge security."

Unfortunately, the knowledge security approach, although one of the best available, has one major flaw -- unlike fingerprints, information is easily transferred, be it revealed voluntarily or involuntarily; thus, someone who is not authorized to use a particular user id may nonetheless find out the user's password. You may say: "Well, we change the passwords every month, so that's not a problem." The very fact that you have to change the passwords every month means that they tend to get out through the grapevine! A good security system does not need to be redone every month, especially since that would mean that -- at least toward the end of the month -- the system is already rather shaky and subject to penetration.

There's a broader range of techniques to store passwords securely, especially important for the 3000 owner who's moving to more popular, less secured IT like cloud computing. We've asked a security pro who manages the pre-payment systems at Oxygen Financial to share these practices for that woolier world out there beyond MPE and the 3000.

By Steve Hardwick, CISSP

There has been a lot in the news recently about password theft and hacking into email accounts. Everything needs a password to access it. One of the side effects of the cloud is the need to be able to separate information from the various users that access a centrally located service. In the case where I have data on my PC, I can create one single password that controls access to all of the apps that reside on the drive plus all of the associated data.

There is a one-to-one physical relationship between the owner and the physical machine that hosts the information. This allows a simpler mechanism to validate the user. In the cloud world it is not as easy. There is no longer a physical relationship with the user. In fact a user may be accessing several different physical locations when running applications or accessing information. This has led to a dramatic increase in the number of passwords and authentication methods that are in use.

Twenty eight years ago today I took my first steps into the world of Hewlett-Packard. I stepped from the workdays of a small town newspaper editor to the monthly quest for news of bits, segments, and mice. When I walked into the Austin office of Wilson Publications, creators of The Chronicle (we didn't dare to use "HP" in the title) I found wood-paneled walls around a desk with no terminal, no keyboard, and no clue about a new HP 3000 coiled and ready to change the system's reach.

The new Series 37 Mighty Mouse was revealed to me and managing editor John Hastings about two weeks after I'd assumed the reporting and writing for that monthly tabloid, just eight issues old at the time. We opened the mail on September 13 to learn of a minicomputer covered by our arch-rival, the Interex user group's InterACT magazine. We'd never seen a Mighty Mouse, and neither had InterACT's Sharon Fisher. But InterACT got a pre-briefing on the first business computer HP ever built that needed no computer room or operators.

Being scooped in your first issue is a humbling way to start a news job. But as a dewy lad of 27, I chalked it up to the lack of newsroom practices at Wilson and began to lift my wings onto the radar of Hewlett-Packard. HP was a company so small at the time that its total quarterly sales were less than today's profits from 2012's last quarter. The $6.4 billion company had a total of five US PR contacts to cover every product in the lineup. It also had several thousand products and more software than it knew how to nurture and improve. But that Mighty Mouse was a shot across the bow of the fleet of personal computers already riding the waves of change. HP said the Series 37, priced at under $20,000 in bare bones, was an alternative to what we called microcomputers.

It can operate in a normal office environment. It looks like a two drawer filing cabinet sitting beside a desk. No air conditioning, special temperature control, or unusual electrical requirements are needed. It can be placed in carpeted rooms. Moreover, it's very quiet; HP claims it makes even less noise than a typewriter.

Longs Drug, I learned by reading my competition, was going to install more than 150 of these Mighty Mice among its hundreds of stores in the Western US. At that time a microcomputer was strictly a device for personal computing, rarely networked with anything. HP wanted businesses to purchase HPWORD, running on the 3000 for office automation, and HP DeskManager for the 3000 to tie workers together with internal mail and document exchange. Thousands of dollars worth of software, piled on top of that $20 grand.

Just outside the door of my paneled office in Texas, we ran a Columbia PC with a 300-baud modem and WordStar, plus PC 2622 software to make that micro behave like an HP terminal. We dialed up to timeshare with a 3000 at Futura Press, where our stories were set and then delivered back to us in galleys which we waxed up and pasted for tabloid layout. It would be another year before we'd even get Compuserve to link us to the rest of the computing world.

Somehow, HP expects to manage to take a declining PC business and an $8 billion writedown in the same quarter, pay for early retirement benefits while it cuts jobs, and then report profitability of about about $1 per share. It takes a sharper accountant's head than this business writer's to tote up PC sales reductions plus billions in a writedown and sum up to profitability. If HP hits its marks, the company would register more than $1 billion in profits for the period.

But that's still likely to be the lowest tally of earnings ever since HP purchased EDS for $13 billion and began to call it HP Services. News media company Berzinga published this forecast of HP's Wednesday afternoon numbers.

HP is expected to report that its fiscal third quarter profit fell 10.9 percent year-over-year to $0.98 per share. That EPS estimate inched up a penny per share in the past 30 days. Analysts have underestimated HP's EPS in the past seven quarters. The Palo Alto, California-based company, like Dell, has faced dwindling PC sales, and analysts on average expect revenue for the quarter to total $30.1 billion. That would be a year-over-year decrease of 3.5 percent. The company is scheduled to share its quarterly results late Wednesday.

Whether there will be red ink on HP's balance sheet for the first time in more than three decades, the company's reach into every aspect of computing looks like it's draining the profits pool at a record rate. Decisions to purchase Autonomy at almost $11 billion, plus that abortive entry into tablets with last summer's TouchPad have taken their toll -- all while the concept of selling datacenter-grade hardware into customer shops keeps losing traction. Cloud-sourced IT, or the near-shoring of computing, is sweeping into longer term planning. With its buy-ups and expansions, HP has become the largest IT datacenter company in the world. As one 3000 vendor who believes in the long term view says, "When you're the biggest, the only place you've got to go is down."

Anybody who wonders where HP 3000s are hanging on can grab a rider strap on the Alameda-Contra Costa transit service. The public entity AC Transit just opened up a one-year contract to maintain its two HP 3000s, along with the applications.

The systems under maintenance are a Series 957 and a Series 987. If you're scoring at home, these are servers built and sold during the 1990s -- still powering a California organization with duties to ferry 191,000 riders daily with a fleet of  584 buses. The District’s service area extends from western Contra Costa County to southern Alameda County, and the organization employs 1,863 employees.

As if that's not enough, this contract -- which is out for bids until Tuesday, Aug. 28 at 10 AM -- has a provision for extension. The district isn't sure when it will be able to stop using those 9x7s.

At the sole discretion of the District, the contract may be extended up to 12 additional months in increments of three months. This is to  accommodate the uncertain end date for the District’s use of these HP 3000 computers.

Arby's sandwich chain turned off some HP 3000s recently, but moving its data stocked a menu's worth of practices and tools. Based on a report from Paul Edwards, the journey worked smoothest when expertise could be outsourced or tapped.

Edwards described part of the project as a move to Oracle's databases, facilitated by Robelle's Suprtool and Speedware's software. The former supplier has retained its name for 35 years by now. The latter has become Fresche Legacy, but DBMotion as well as AMXW software is still available for data transfers. In the photo at left, the veteran Edwards is in motion himself, flying on a 1968-69 US Navy tour on the USS Hornet. He figures he's been working with 3000s half his life, which would give him enough time in to witness Robelle's entry into the market, as well as the transformation of Infocentre into Speedware, and then to Fresche Legacy.

I'm standing on the right. The two young guys kneeling down are the enlisted operators that ride in the back of the plane. The guy standing on the left is our Crew 13 Aircraft Commander. The aircraft is an S-2E Tracker Carrier Based Anti-Submarine Warfare Navy aircraft. It has a large propeller attached to a 1500hp Wright R1820-82 engine -- one of two on the plane.

Some of the data moves at Arby's went to Oracle, he reports. "They were using Oracle for part of their operations. Using Speedware with Oracle was interesting. Most of that was dumping data with Suprtool or Speedware, then formatting it in the layout they wanted." Suprtool has been guided and developed by Neil Armstrong at Robelle for nearly two decades. He recently marked his 20th year with the vendor, according to the Robelle newsletter.

Arby's also took its payroll application off the 3000, "and it went off to a service bureau. We had the file layouts that bureau wanted, and so it was a lot easier. We just said, 'this field is the one on the HP system, and this field on your layouts is equivalent.' We just matched them all up. We had some where we could say 'forget about that field, we won't need it.' "

But the transition to Oracle, as performed by a team that was supposed to be experienced in the database, was not so easy.

Starting today at 2PM US Eastern (11AM Pacific) MB Foster offers another in its series of 45-minute webinars about IT strategies. The latest interactive broadcast (Birket Foster asks for questions throughout) is on legacy modernization. These are skills that can serve both homesteading and migration missions. Sometimes, this kind of modernization serves homesteading, and then modernization.

At times our community members mistake this era -- the second decade after HP's exit announcement -- as a static period. Good management doesn't see it that way. An IT environment should be evolving. Best practices on modernization can deliver ideas as well as field reports. From the MB Foster teaser about the webinar:

Organizations are often challenged to extend IT investments by modernizing legacy applications to both avoid the costs of maintaining legacy environments, and increase the supportability and usability of the applications. Migrations involve high-level planning, low-level detail study and budgets.

Attendees will learn about best practices and proven risk mitigation strategies that will allow you to get started and deliver a thought provoking synopsis to your senior management team.

You register online at the MB Foster website, a painless minute or two. You'll get an email with login directions. We'll follow up with a summary, but the value of being able to ask questions is only available if you log in this afternoon.

One element consistent in HP 3000 migrations: the loss of support from the system's maker. HP's support operations include the HP Services unit, the artist formerly known as EDS. A couple of recent news items point at a loss in value when customers hire HP to support their systems.

A report in the Wall Street Journal's blog All Things Digital says that HP's CEO was in Australia last week, apologizing to a major bank about a Windows patching failure. It was serious enough that the mistake will take months to correct, according to another story in the Aussie tech website Delimiter.

One industry source with knowledge of the situation said they had never seen a situation quite like it in Australia. The problem is believed to have affected around a quarter of the bank’s desktop PC machines.

While HP's Meg Whitman was visiting the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, her company announced that the head of HP Services was "leaving the company to pursue other interests." HP also reported it will take an $8 billion charge on its Q3 finances as a result of "the impairment of goodwill within its Services segment."

Customers might wonder if a major bank IT meltdown and the Services charge are related. Whether they are or not, the Services engine that pushes HP profits and growth -- and contributes to some exodus of 3000 sites -- is sputtering this year.

HP has pushed hard to entice the enterprise to make the cloud a new home for business data. While evaluating the pros and cons of making a cost-saving move from classic HP 3000 datacenters to the cloud, this guide of what's to be managed will help. Our security analyst Steve Hardwick looks closer at the challenges a manager must resolve if their onsite storage and systems can be replaced with remote infrastructure.

By Steve Hardwick, CISSP
Oxygen Finance

There has been a lot of buzz around cloud-based solutions. There is a lot to be said for moving to this architecture, especially the lower operating costs. However, a lot of the press has been sourced by suppliers such as HP -- the same people who provide the cloud solutions. It is no surprise that the picture they paint is very rosy. Fortunately, if done well, a cloud transition can be a very successful endeavor. But what are some of the challenges in embarking on this adventure? Let me give you some background on the type of security challenges you are going to face. I will also offer a set of free resources that are invaluable in tackling this migration.

First of all, a little security 101. In the security world there is a very common acronym, CIA. It is not what you may think. It stands for Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Confidentiality is the part of security that is concerned with ensuring that only authorized users can view or copy information. This is the first thing that comes to mind when most people think about security. Integrity is concerned with the accuracy of the data, only authorized users can create and change information. Finally Availability addresses the ability of authorized uses to perform these actions upon the information.

A few examples help illustrate these concepts. Confidentiality: a password protected encrypted file. Only the user with the password can access the data. Integrity: a password protected public web side. Although many people can view the data, only authorized users can create or modify it. Availability: data is backed up to a remote storage service. If there is a drive failure, an authorized user or IT manager can still get access to data by getting a copy of the backup.

Like any journey it is important to understand your point of origin. Let's take a look at some of the inherent security controls in an on-premise solution which is already in place.

While I'm researching the meaty bits of the 3000 for its autobiography, I found another rich resource in a chat with Birket Foster. Like few other vendors, he's celebrated 35 years this year of 3000 business. Yesterday he pointed me at a few dreamy links of HP concept videos.

These are the fond wishes of companies looking toward the future. The video of 1995 was broadcast to the press and the public during the year 1988, when the NewWave office communication products were just released. Ideals in this video -- which is full of office drama about winning a big contract -- include interactive agents tracking schedules and taking voice commands to create reports, plus presentation tools automated by spoken commands.

Everything was connected in an "all-in" concept using HP's NewWave foundation. The HP 3000 had a NewWave role, providing the data to make reports from a well-connected database. I thought 1995 was lost to dusty VCR collections, but Birket tracked it down via YouTube. Concept videos can be unintentionally comic. You can tell from this one it was written in the era of suspenders, white shirts and ties in the office. That's just about the time of the start of HP's shift-to-Unix campaign. And the HP 3000 and other product names are never used. Unlikely to be named, the 3000 just works.

This just-works ideal still lives in the 3000's heritage. A couple of interviews from industry veterans like Ron Miller of Amerigroup and Paul Edwards referenced that reliability pledge. Both said that when the 3000 just worked, the computer was demonstrating its strongest asset. Compared to the alternatives at the start of 3000 service, the MPE ideals must've seemed as far forward as a 1995 vison which was devised in 1989.

Speedware has become Fresche Legacy this year, but the vendor's still got its storehouse of HP 3000 documents, white papers and even HP patches available online. You just have to poke directly at the pages you want to hit.

When it became Fresche in the spring, the company put a new face on its website. For awhile it was tough to hop into any HP 3000 page from those Speedware days. But a direct link opens the path to documents which are not found many other places on the Web. HP-authored MPE whitepapers, for example.

The company announced this summer that it's just booked five outsourcing agreements with North American companies worth more than $10 million. These are application outsource contracts -- the sort of business resource which Fresche Legacy continues to offer in the 3000 marketplace.

However, there's still a good deal of resource online from the many years when Speedware was an HP Platinum migration partner, as well as a supplier of migration software such as AMXW. That software's still available today. The HP 3000 paper and patch site has a front door of www.speedware.com/HPe3000_resources

As 3000 users move out of their protected and obscure MPE/iX, they encounter more virulent environmental waters. Never mind the malware and spyware aimed at Windows and Macs. (Yes, Apple systems are targets, although few have been hacked en masse). This weekend's big story from popular blogger Mat Honan revealed he got his Gmail swiped, his Mac and iPad wiped remotely, his Twitter account heisted, and his iPhone hijacked. All in a matter of minutes because one password, off the new Apple iCloud, was stolen.

This kind of perfect storm happened because the blogger had plenty of computing systems protected by a single password. By coincidence of course, HP released an the HP Technology at Work IT business eNewsletter that suggests some good password practices. But it starts out with bad advice.

"Try putting your hands on the keyboard and just typing randomly -- a gibberish password can be very secure." This sort of consumer-grade instruction bypasses two of the three security requirements for passwords in the industry.

"There is an acronym in the security world: CIA," says Steve Hardwick, a CISSP pro whose current mission is security for the pre-payment systems at Oxygen Financial. "That's Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability. So the HP advice is true on one count, but not all of them. This is a very common security mistake."

Editor's note: After reading our article on SLT creation and validation yesterday, consultant Brian Edminster adds some notes on how to employ VSTORE in your 3000 management. He's also working on an article that covers backup automation.

By Brian Edminster
Applied Technologies 

If possible, do your VSTOREs on a different (but compatible model) of tape drive than the one the tape was created on. Why? DDS tape drives (especially DDS-2 and DDS-3 models) slowly go out of alignment as they wear.

In other words, it's possible to write a backup tape, and have it successfully VSTORE on the same drive. But if you have to take that same tape to a different server with a new and in-alignment drive, you could have it not be readable! Trust me on this -- I've had it happen.)

If you'll only ever need to read tapes on the same drive as you wrote them, you're still not safe. What happens if you write a tape on a worn drive, have the drive fail at some later date -- and that replacement drive cannot read old backup tapes? Yikes!

At a recent visit to a customer's shop, VEsoft's Vladimir Volokh spread the word about System Load Tapes. The SLTs are a crucial component to making serious backups of HP 3000s. Vladimir saw a commonplace habit at the shop: Skipping the reading of the advice they'd received.

"I don't know exactly what to do about my SLT," the manager told him. "HP built my first one using a CD. Do I need that CD?"

His answer was no, because HP was only using the most stable media to build that 3000's first SLT. But Vladimir had a question in reply. Do you read the NewsWire? "Yes, I get it in my email, and my mailbox," she said. But like other tech resources, ours hadn't been consulted to advise on such procedures, even though we'd run an article about 10 days ago covering CSLTs. That tape's rules are the same as for SLTs. Create one each time something changes in your configuration for your 3000.

Other managers figure they'd better be creating an SLT with every backup. Not needed, but there's one step that gets skipped in the process.

 

 

Over at the headquarters of HP's Business Critical Systems division, the streamers and sighs of relief float in the air this week. A court of California has ruled that Oracle must continue to do business with HP just as it always did. That threat of killing off its database for use on the Itanium systems -- as therefore, HP-UX -- was an empty one if Oracle follows the law and the ruling of a judge.

The HP 3000 had a similar close call more than once in its life. During 1993 and 1994 HP was hammering away at the core of the 3000 customer base. It used R&D managers and GMs to convince leading app vendors they'd be better served by porting to HP-UX. By the spring of '94 Adager organized a Proposition 3000 movement (like the California propositions, all numbered) complete with fine embroidered t-shirts. We wore them to the Interex Computer Management Symposium and lashed at the HP managers on hand.

Soon enough, sense seemed to prevail at HP. A revival of the tech investment began that brought out a better database, moved the system into the open source and Internet world, attracted new customers through the likes of Smith-Gardner ecommerce, and generally swung the sales meter upward. In the middle of this trend we started the NewsWire to spread the word about that year's renaissance.

But HP was a vendor with its own mission. A success in rebooting HP's 3000 business was certified by new sales, right up to the year Hewlett-Packard sounded its swan song for 3000 futures. We had won the battle with HP, but the damage was done with an internal wound. And so goes the same song for Oracle and HP-UX, and probably the future of that operating system inside HP this time. Oracle backs away with this court ruling. But this week's win delivers no proof there's a healthy future for Oracle's HP relationship. You cannot force a company to do business differently, not even if there are tens of thousands of customers who desire the same kind of love they've had for decades.

After more than a year of accusations, secret document dumps, and a glut of suits and countersuits, HP has a victory in its lawsuit against Oracle to save the Itanium servers. Hewlett-Packard didn't paint the suit in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County California as a battle for Itanium's future. But in winning the ruling from Judge James P. Kleinberg, HP will force Oracle to keep selling and porting its database for Itanium servers. Oracle believed that a clause in a lawsuit which settled hiring away Mark Hurd didn't force Oracle to stay in the HP market.

Oracle said it will appeal the ruling immediately. The next step of the lawsuit is to bring the matter in front of a jury to determine damages Oracle must pay HP. Hewlett-Packard estimated it would have lost $4 billion in HP-UX and Integrity business if Oracle had won. Much of it was calculated in support fees.

Legal and industry analysts, as well as members of the 3000 community, are not completely convinced this settles the future for Oracle on Itanium. The judge noted that Oracle and HP were once close partners. Kleinberg noted in his ruling that both companies made a lot of profit for many years working together. It all began to unravel in the spring of 2010, after the former HP CEO Hurd was cleared to take a systems leadership job with HP's rival Sun/Oracle.

Oracle must port its products to Itanium servers without charge, the judge ruled. Oracle said it decided to dump Itanium and HP-UX because it believes the chip is approaching its end of life. Oracle didn't say that about HP-UX. But the operating system only runs on Itanium servers by now, unless a company's got older, PA-RISC-based servers.

Alan Yeo of Screenjet, a provider of tools and services to modernize legacy interfaces on the 3000, believes HP isn't going to extend the HP-UX lifespan very much as a result of a court ruling. "HP don't want to be in the operating systems business anymore," he said yesterday. "That's not where they're going."

NewsWire subscribers who receive our email updates have heard that I'm collecting stories about the early 3000's days. I'm working on an autobiography of the 3000, written "as told to" me, by the system. I've fielded phone calls and gotten some nice email stories. Today's was great fun to read and instructive, too. That's because the negative experiences in our lives are remembered clearer than the positive ones. 

What I mean to say is that war stories are more fun to read, chock-a-block with details. Before I offer an excerpt from today's story, I want to make an observation about the 3000's life. It wasn't always the better time we prefer to remember.

Even the president of the Connect user group falls prey to this memory. In his column in the latest user group magazine, Steve Davidek remembered days when HP was packed with people eager to service a 3000 customer. After a disk head crash in 1984, Davidek recounted three HP employees he knew by name who chipped in to resolve the problem. A different time indeed, when Davidek managed just one Series III HP 3000.

Our HP sales rep would visit every month or so just to see how we were doing. Some months he'd even bring a Systems Engineer along to check on things. It was amazing.

Dave Wiseman, who says that "Most of you will know me as the idiot dragging the alligator at the Orlando conference, or maybe as the guy behind Millware," told us a tale of days even earlier in the 3000's life. Buying a system from HP in 1978 meant investing in a terminal to test your application -- before HP would even fill the system order.