Managers running MPE/iX in Europe can get a backup HP 3000 server today on auction at $1.07 plus shipping costs. Considering this is a two-CPU server which you can essentially tuck under your arm, (as HP product manager Dave Snow does at left, when the server was unveiled in 2001) the shipping costs might permit even North American 3000 managers to bid.

Dennis Grevenstein posted his notice of the sale last night on the HP3000 mailing list. The eBay auction starts at a minimum of 1 Euro, or about $1.07 at today's exchange rate. As of this evening there were no starting bids posted. The listing starts in German, but not too far down the page Grevenstein has English translations on the details.

Other than servers which have been given away for the cost of shipping, this is the lowest price we've ever seen for an HP 3000—especially for a model that's nearly portable and was built after 2001. Many 9x7-9x9 servers have been offered for outrageous discounts, especially considering their original pricing. This is an ultimate-generation HP 3000. Earlier this month, a single-processor A500 was being offered for $1,200 in North America.

The description notes that the German server is an rp2740 "with a slightly different firmware. It will also run HP-UX or Linux without problems. There is one hard disk with MPE/iX 7.5 on it and a spare disk." The note reminded one 3000 veteran about the performance drag HP that saddled the RISC processor with as a result of that firmware. The eBay listing is straightforward about how much the HP of 15 years ago hobbled the A-Class.

By Jeff Kubler
Kubler Consulting

Along with the relationship between your CPU measurements and overall performance, memory and disk make up the other two components of your HP 3000 performance picture. Main memory is the scratch pad for all the work that the CPU performs. Every item of data that the CPU needs to perform calculations on or updating to must be brought into main memory.

The CPU must manage memory. It must cycle through the memory pages, marking some as Overlay Candidates (this means that new data from disk may be placed here), noting that some are in continued use, and swapping others out to virtual or what is called transient storage. Swapping to disk occurs when data is in continued use but a higher priority process needs room for its data.

To accommodate this higher priority process and its need for memory space, the Memory Manager will swap the memory for the lower priority process out to disk. The more activity the Memory Manager performs, the more CPU it takes to do this. Therefore it is the percentage of CPU used to manage memory that we use as a measurement.

Thursday, at 2 PM EST (11 PST, 8 PM CET) there's an MB Foster webinar show covering emulation options. For the 3000 owner and manager who hasn't yet moved off HP's 3000 iron, no what matter where you're headed, there's something in this 60 minutes for you.

Last summer's version of the webinar walked its viewers through Foster's eZ-MPE, Ordat's TI2/SQL, Marxmeier's Eloquence database suite, and the Stromasys 3000 hardware emulator Charon. Only the last product delivers no changes to software and frees you from HP's aging boxes. But the other three offer ways to mimic parts of the 3000's heart and soul.

eZ-MPE is the newest of the emulate-to-migrate products. Introduced in 2013, it's a suite of software to accommodate the data infrastructure and scripting needs of today's HP 3000 sites. The Thursday show includes a demonstration of the MB Foster product.

TI2/SQL gives TurboIMAGE users (pretty much everybody who's still running a 3000) an avenue into SQL databases like SQLServer. And Eloquence replaces the IMAGE database wholesale, using an SQL-based data platform with deep work-alikes for IMAGE intrinsics and features.

It should be an interesting show. The distinctions between the first three products and Charon will be obvious by the end of the presentation, so stick around to the finale. That wrap-up is also the portion of the webinar for free-form questions. It's getting rare to have a place to ask those in a semi-public setting. I hope to hear from you during the webinar. MB Foster's got a means to listen and watch these shows after their airing. But the Q&A part is live-only.

One of the most unpredictable hardware devices in HP's 3000 iron is its SCSI drives. Out in the user community one enterprising manager is trying to link the server to microSD cards. John Zoltak checked in with other users last week about the project.

Zoltak was simply trying to copy one 917LX disk to a new disk on the server's SCSI bus. A 4GB drive is standard on a 917, so just about any microSD card would match that storage. A bit of open source wizardry props up SCSI2SD, a combination of hardware and software. You can purchase an SCSI2SD card on eBay and in other Web outposts.

Zoltak didn't begin there, however. He was searching for an offline diagnostic tool to do the disk copying. "I want to copy the system volume sets, so using VOLUTIL is not an option. And at this point just how does anyone get the diagnostics passwords? My other choice is to attach the 3000 disks to a PC and copy there."

That other choice leads the way to SCSI2SD. Using PC-based disks, of course, is one of the serious advantages to using a Stromasys Charon emulator for 3000 work. The 9x7s are so old they don't have a Charon equivalent, but the strategy is the same. 

As for ODE, once you locate a diagnostics password (an exercise left to the 3000 customers who have a support provider) you must be prepared to wait on DISCCOPY. "There is a DISCCOPY in the ODE," Craig Lalley reports. "Hook up both drives and you should be able to copy the drive if it is copyable. I must warn you, it is slow, like all night all day sort of slow. But it is free."

By Gilles Schipper
Homesteading Editor

One straightforward way to improve the value of an HP 3000 is replacement. That is, finding a better disk storage hardware component—replacing what shipped with your 3000 with a corresponding disk subsystem, one that offers the superb protection of hardware RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).

I would also recommend this replacement for those who utilize HP 3000 Mirror/iX software—since Mirror/iX does not protect the MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET volume set . It also forces one to utilize user volume sets even if the situation does not otherwise warrant it. I believe there is a place for user volume sets, but only in very specific and limited circumstances.

The main advantage of hardware RAID is that it offers excellent protection from disk failures and resulting data loss and time lost due to data recovery requirements. Chances are good that you are if you are a candidate to benefit from hardware RAID, your existing disk technology is relatively old and prone to failure as a result of years of use.

Let's face it, unlike a good wine, older HP 3000 hardware and its associated peripherals do not get better with age. Quite the contrary.

However, even if you choose a RAID technology that is also relatively old or obsolete, the nature of the technology itself affords you a great measure of protection from disk failures and corresponding data loss and downtime.

The inexpensive choices include the Nike Mod10 or Mod20 and the HP Autoraid 12H. A higher-end RAID solution is in HP’s VA7000 family of products.

You don't see many requests for HP 3000 expertise by now, at least not in a public setting. But a boutique placement agency posted a request for COBOL experience on the 3000 mailing list this week. The notice doesn't deliver many details, but it stands out in a job market where opportunities have been few.

Under the covers, where consultants and developers serve 3000 shops both on the move as well as homesteading, gigs lurk. One veteran knows another and they'll contract for a period together. Most of these engagements involve finding someone familiar with a piece of 3000 software.

MRG Search and Placement has a website but there's no public listing of available positions. It's just as classic old-school as a lot of the talent that could fill those jobs. The message in public was simply "HP3000 skills needed in an University setting," and went on to mention COBOL was involved. The language usually is, considering the vast percentage of in-house apps written in the language.

Jon Culotta runs MRG, which is upfront about keeping 3000 customers and talent connected.  "Established in 1976, MRG started its niche recruiting in the HP 3000 arena. That core market is still served today." The company's heartland is Amisys healthcare software talent, but a university might only be involved if it was a health organization operated by a school.

The job is on-site and contract. Culotta's email is [email protected].

HP's 3000 hardware is still being offered for sale. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise wants none of this 2017 action. Independent hardware brokers sell HP 3000s today, and by the looks of the pricing the transactions might be simply for parts. How could anyone operate a company while they rely on a $975 server?

The price is one data point on a wide spectrum of a sweeping array of servers, all offered on the 3000 mailing list this week. At the tip-top of the spectrum was a $3,175 system, first introduced early in the 1990s. At the very bottom was the faithful Series 918LX, priced at $675 including a DDS-3 tape drive. The newest computers came in at that $975 price.

The range of power ran from the 918 to the Series 989KS/650. It was a $290,000 system sold new in the late 1990s. The one on offer this week from the broker carried a price tag that was discounted $288,625.

Antiques? Some, perhaps, but not all. Series 918 and 928 servers from HP—both on the list—are running production systems today. Roy Brown, a consultant and developer in the UK and a member of the 3000 list, is running two Series 918s. One much newer server is holding archives at a migrated shop in Texas. While using the old, or very old HP iron one smart customer keeps support current for such boxes. Even when they're not on the critical path for computing.

On January 26 MB Foster is airing the 2017 edition of its emulation webinar. The 40-minute show will walk 3000 managers through four emulation options. Last year's show had four very different products. Three will address the MPE/iX environment: how to get your applications onto the Windows OS. One will give you emulated hardware. In the first edition of the webinar, Birket Foster called the Charon emulator for 3000 hardware emulation "flawless."

The other three solutions — unless the lineup changes from last year's show — are all based in software methods to replicate databases and surrounding code. They are

• Ti2SQL middleware from Ordat (a holder of an MPE/iX source code license, along with Pivital Solutions)
• Marxmeier's Eloquence database environment
• MB Foster's eZ-MPE

The MB Foster environment emulation solution has been working for at least one customer. We introduced it in 2013. Here's our story from that year for reference. We'll all look forward to the update at 11 AM PST.

eZ-MPE opens new Windows for 3000 sites

MB Foster is announcing a hybrid of solutions aimed at making migrations off the 3000 easier. The company is calling its offering MBF eZ-MPE, and it’s aiming customers at the native benefits of working in Windows once they make their transition. MBF eZ-MPE is a solution for HP 3000 sites that have a keen interest in transitioning to a Windows environment, while they preserve their company’s competitive advantage and legacy applications.

In 2008 was the debate, and I don't mean between our now-outgoing President and his rival. The debate was in your community about future knowledge. Where could you expect to find HP 3000 and MPE/iX manuals in the coming years? It didn't turn out to be where it was planned and proposed, but a manager of a homestead 3000 does have options today.

For many years, MMM Support hosted the full range of HP's manuals for hardware and software. As of this morning the website is offline, but it's probably a configuration error and not a sign of a company's demise. You'll find plenty of links on our blog to the hpmmmsupport.com site. The manuals are in PDF format and you don't experience any pop-up or page-takeover ads like you see in YouTube.

The newer player in the hosted HP manual arena is TeamNA Consulting. While it's a newer site, the venture is led by one of the older (in history) resources. Neil Armstrong, one of the tech wizards at Robelle, is the NA in TeamNA. Armstrong started with the HP 3000 more than 34 years ago—an era where MPE IV was still a common OS for the servers. Plenty of experience there, and plenty of manuals available too. More manuals than HP will share with the world today. The extra information is hardware documentation.

This wasn't the future the 3000 community expected in the days when official 3000 support from HP was nearly gone. Today that support is well-filled by companies like Pivital, a bedrock upon which homesteading and 3000 emulation rests.

Reid Baxter started his work in the HP 3000 world in 1981. This year he's helping to support the IT at the US Federal Reserve in Richmond, VA. There is no direct line between these two postings. Baxter has made the most of his career that started with MPE and terminals to lead to his current post where he helps maintain computers that serve the US banking bedrock, The Fed.

Baxter, one of the earliest 3000 Newswire subscribers, checked in this week to congratulate us on another anniversary as we crossed into the 22d calendar year of publishing. It's been quite a while, as Baxter says, since an HP 3000 was in his life: seven years ago he transitioned off everyday 3000 duty when his employer JP Morgan-Chase closed down its MPE/iX servers.

Baxter went into support of the 3000's successor at Chase, HP-UX, and then onward into Linux. When your skillset goes as far back as HP's Data Terminal Division, a new environment presents more opportunity than challenge. The 3000 once had a place in banking IT, which is why Chase once deployed the ABLE software suite from CASE for asset management.

After Chase did a downsize in 2015, Baxter went on a lengthy quest to land a new spot in finance computing. He's working today for HP Enterprise Services, by way of the Insight Global staffing enterprise. His mission is support of that Fed IT center, work that he can do remotely. One reason for that telecommute is that banking has often needed remote computing. Banking software on the 3000 once drove the adoption of Internet services on the business server, after all.

Due to a disk crash, I had to reload my HP 3000 system recently. I’ve just discovered that system logging has been suspended. How do I resume system logging?

Paul Christidis replies:

The reason for the suspension of logging was most likely due to a duplicate log file name. When the SLT was created the then-current log number was recorded, and when you restarted the system from your most recent SLT it tried to open the sequentially next log file. Said file already existed.

• MOVE the existing log files to a hold area
• Determine what logfile the system resumed on
• Perform a series of SWITCHLOG commands until the logfile number advances to one more than the highest number in the hold area
• Then move the held logfiles back to the pub.sys group — replacing the ones created by the series of ‘switchlog’ commands.

Is there a way to see the IP address associated with a particular login?

Any user with SM can do the following, for example:

:SHOWVAR HPSTDIN_NETWORK_ADDR;JOB=#S495
HPSTDIN_NETWORK_ADDR = 172.16.0.30

The command :listf ci.pub.sys,8 will list all sessions and will show their associated IP address.

I’ve got an older model HP 3000 and I'd like to start monitoring it with SNMP for things like CPU utilized, jobs running or whatever other cool stat I can SNMP-grab. The problem I have is I can’t find the MIBs for it anywhere.

Andreas Schmidt replies:

First of all, I do not recommend the use of SNMP on the 3000, for performance but also security reasons. SNMP is not the securest protocol, as you know. Nevertheless, here are some hints:

• In the group NET.SYS you will find the SNMPUDC. This should be set in any case for MANAGER.SYS or on system level.
• Having set this, a SNMPCONTROL STATUS will show you the status of the SNMP subsystem.
• SNMPCONTROL START / STOP are self-explaining.
• The MIBs specific for MPE can be found in the document HP SNMP/XL User’s Guide

Seeing the future clearly is not simple, and planning for our tomorrows is a crucial mission for most HP 3000 owners and allies. Changes easily cloud the vision of any futurist—people who dream up scenarios and strategies instead of writing science fiction.

Or as Yoda said, "Difficult to tell; always in motion is the future."

Economics makes every future vision more compelling. A friend who just became a city council member reminded me of this when she talked about taxis and hotel checkouts. These things are the equivalent of COBOL and batch job streaming—just to remind you this post is an IT report. Disruption surrounds them. COBOL, batch, hotels, and taxis still keep our world on its feet. Nearly all of us reach for a legacy solution when we're finished sitting in the bathroom, too.

The new council member forwarded a futurist's article on Facebook—where so many get their news today, alas—an article that pegged so many bits of the economy that are supposed to be going the way of MPE V. (I think we can all agree it's really over for the OS that powered 3000s before PA-RISC.) The Facebook article says we need only to look at Kodak in 1998 when it "had 170,000 employees and sold 85 percent of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt." The timing is wrong, just like the timeframe predicted for total migration of the 3000 base. Was: 2008. Now in 2017: still incomplete.

The futurism you hear predicts things like "What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years — and most people won't see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that three years later you would never take pictures on film again?" Nobody did, because it wasn't true in 2001 that film disappeared. Neither had MPE disappeared by 2006. These predictions get mangled as they are retold. This year's IT skills must include patience to see the future's interlocking parts—a skill that a 3000 owner and manager can call upon right now. Since it's 2017, in one decade we'll be facing the final year of the date-handling in MPE that works as HP designed it. I'll only be 70 and will be looking for the story on who will fix the ultimate HP 3000 bug.

I love reading futurist predictions. They have to concoct a perfect world to make sense, and the timing is almost always wrong. Kodak took another 14 years after 1998 to file for bankruptcy. But after I disagreed with my friend, she reached for her own success at using disruptive tech to make her point. Even an anecdotal report is better than retelling abstracted stories. The danger with anecdotes is that they can be outliers. We heard them called corner cases in support calls with HP. You don't hear the phrase "corner case" during an independent support call. The independent legacy support company is accountable to a customer in the intense way a hotel operator commits to a guest. A guest is essential to keeping a hotel open. A lodger at an Airbnb is not keeping the doors open, or keeping jobs alive for a staff of housekeepers. There can be unexpected results to disrupting legacies. People demand things change back from a future vision. Ask voters in the US how that turned out last year.

Here in the opening days of the New Year it's time to resolve your way to a cleaner 2017. People in the US and the UK voted for changes starting this year and they'll get some, including unexpected ones. You don't want unexpected change on your homesteading HP 3000 system, though. One of the simplest means to forestall a crisis is getting fresh media for your backups. MPE/iX system backups are no better than the media they employ.

Not long ago, a 3000 manager was looking for fresh DLT tape for his backups. Tape remains a part of the backup regimen at some shops, never more true than at a site still using HP's 3000 hardware. DDS drive verification should be among your new year's examinations.

New tape media is available for purchase. New tape all the way back to DDS-1 is on the Data Tech Store website. As a minimum 2017 homestead resolution, write a fresh backup onto new tape.

Disk backup will pull your homestead practices out of the 1990s. As DLT technology fades, cheap high capacity Serial ATA discs took their turn as the method of choice for large backups. Store to disk should be the next generation of MPE/iX backup. Using an SCSI to SATA converter, newer drives can capture backups from 3000s. HP's SCSI storage devices for 3000s are at least a decade old by now. SATA disks work well for smaller systems where Model 20 HP backup units are overkill.

The age of media can be offset by more recent design. Although it's slower and has lower capacity, tape is a seasoned technology. On the other hand, disk has the advantage of being engineered more recently. Pencils versus rollerball pens is a similar consideration. You know exactly how long a pencil can be used. Pens are more indelible but expire unexpectedly.

MPE/iX servers created using the Charon emulator from Stromasys can even employ SSD disks for backups. Verifying any media, new or old, should be on a manager's to-do list for 2017. It's even better to craft a regimen that rotates fresh media, whether you're relying on tape or storing to disk.