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Hidden Value details commands and procedures in MPE that can improve your productivity with HP 3000 systems. Send your tips and your questions to john@burke-consulting.com.

Edited by John Burke

We moved an Allbase DBE/database from one 3000 system to another. Now when the users attempt to connect, they get: START DBE disallowed: DBEnvironment points to a wrong log file. (DBERR 3106) What is the problem?

Bill Cadier and Russ Rino reply:
The log file wasn’t restored with the database/DBE, so you’ll need to do a START DBE NEWLOG, for example:
:ISQL
isql=> start dbe ‘DBENAME’ multi newlog log dbefile DBEdblog03 with pages=1000, name=’DBElog03’;

I’m a new sys admin. I started this job in July, just before the new N-Class came to replace the 987 as a development/production shadow machine and we upgraded the production 969 to 7.0. Now we’ve got this perfectly good 987 on our hands, and my boss is wondering if we can move it to our out-of-state site and use it for disaster recovery. But we would need to upgrade it to 7.0 in order to shadow (Shareplex) our production machine to it, right? Can we even shadow to two different machines in the first place?

John Clogg, Ron Horner and John Burke reply:
7.0 will not boot on any 9x7 Series system. There is, however, no technical reason for it not working. HP marketing simply decided to try to goose up sales of new systems by forcing the obsolescence of the 9x7s. [As of HP World 2002, HP is still insisting it will not change this policy.] 6.5 is as far as you can go on a 9x7.

As for Netbase/Shareplex shadowing to multiple machines, absolutely it can do that. Of course you’d need the license for the extra machine. Note that the shadow machine can be on 6.5 even while the master machine is on 7.0.

I have a question regarding the build command. Last night I had a job fail because the build for the file failed. The command BUILD NEWFILE;DISC=524288,1,1;REC=
-384,21,F,ASCII was failing, complaining of no disc space. What puzzled me was that DISCFREE showed more than 40 million sectors free. Then when I removed the ,1,1 from the DISC parameter, the build worked. I am just curious as to why. I know the ,1,1 has to do with extents, but I never learned the reasoning for them, or what they really mean.

John Burke, Mike Church and Tom Emerson reply:
You were trying to allocate all the space in one extent (that’s what the “1,1” means); i.e. one contiguous block of storage. Undoubtedly, your disk is fragmented sufficiently that this was impossible.

What is the file size limit for a RIO file? My system (6.5) gives me the FSERR 106 message when trying to build the file. I tried specifying the number of extents and got the same result.

:BUILD LRR01003.group.account;REC=-187,,F,ASCII;RIO;DISC=550000
EXTENT SIZE EXCEEDS MAXIMUM (FSERR 106)

:calc 550000*187
102850000, $6215DD0, %610256720

Michael Berkowitz notes:
RIO files are one of the few file types that are not in native mode, which means they are limited to a half-Gb.

John Burke replies:
Actually, this a somewhat of a misleading error message. You have fragmentation “issues.” Try “DISC=550000,32,32” (the maximum number of extents is 32) and see if that does not work. If it does not, then you really have fragmentation problems (assuming you have adequate total disc space) that you need to address either through a total reload (ugh) or one of several software utilities that will do defragmentation.

I now have the newest supported version of Samba running. I changed my Samba startup jobs to match the supplied jobs. The problem is, how do I stop the jobs with resorting to abortjob? The relevant line from the new job (for nmb) is:
!xeq nmbd207.samba.sys “-D -p 137”

Lars Appel replies:
Try using the pid files /SAMBA/SMB207/var/locks/?mbd.pid for kill. Samba 2.x creates those .pid files automatically during startup.

Why is my system clock running slow? We have a 979-200 on MPE/iX 6.0 PP2. It loses about one minute per day.

Bill Cadier replies:
If your system does not have MPEKXY0 installed you should consider installing it. This patch has been superseded a few times so if you have MPELX38, MPELXG5, MPELXK9 or MPEKXR0 installed then you would have MPEKXY0 too. None of these patches was on 6.0 PowerPatch 2.

If you already have one of these patches then the problem could be hardware related so it might be worth contacting your hardware support people to check that out.

Bob J. adds:
Another possibility was addressed by a firmware update. The text from the current CPU firmware (41.33) update PF_CMHK4133 mentions:

“System clock (software maintained) loses time. The time loss occurs randomly and may result in large losses over a relatively short time period. Occurrences of the above problem have only been reported against the HP 3000 979KS/x00 (Mohawk) systems. Software applications that perform frequent calling of a PDC routine, PDC_CHASSIS, affect the amount of time lost by the system clock. Your hardware support company should be happy to update for you.”

Tongue firmly in cheek, Wirt Atmar notes:
My first guess would be relativistic time dilation effects as viewed by an observer at a distance due to the fact that you’re now migrating off of the HP 3000 at an ever accelerating rate. My second guess, although it’s less likely, would be that your machine has found out that it’s about ready to be abandoned and is so depressed that it simply can no longer work at normal speed. We’ve certainly kept this information from our HP 3000s. There’s just no reason that they need to know this kind of thing at the moment.

And, in the same vein, Bernie Sherrard adds:
Look at the bright side. At a loss of one minute per day, you won’t get to 12/31/2006, until 2 AM on 1/2/2007. So, you will get 26 hours of support beyond everyone else.

Some time ago, I recall seeing a reference to commands that would remount a DDS cartridge, without the operator having to physically take the tape out and put it back into the drive. I searched the Archives, but did not find what I was looking for. What is the correct command?

Paul Courry replies:
DEVCTRL.MPEXL.TELESUP. Just type in the name without any parameters and it will squirt back the instructions for use.

Stan Sieler adds:
In addition to DEVCTRL, you might want to check out our free ONLINE program at www.allegro.com/software/hp3000/allegro.html#ONLINE

We are trying to access a database on our old system using QUERY and it is asking for a password. I have done a LISTF ,-3 on the database, but there is no lockword listed (which I assumed would be the password). Where do I find the password assigned to a database?

John Burke replies:
Assuming you do not have access to the original schema and you want to know what the password is, not just access the database, then sign on as the creator in the group with the database, run DBUTIL.PUB.SYS and issue the command SHOW databasename PASSWORDS

Mike Church and Joseph Dolliver add:
If you just want to access the database, log on to the system as the database creator and, when asked for password, put in a “;” semi-colon and hit return.

We have a new HP laser printer that will need to be accessed via our network and the 3000. We don’t have any LDEVs available. What process do I need to follow to set up a new one? Do I set it up in SYSGEN and NMMGR?

John Burke and Gary Jackson reply:
You do not need either SYSGEN or NMMGR. You can use IOCONFIG and dynamically add network printers. Also, as far as an LDEV, you will be able to choose any number not currently used. This was all first documented in the MPE/iX Communicator 5.5 (see docs.hp.com/mpeix/onlinedocs/communicator/ix55/main.html for details).

I am building a 989 from scratch, using 6.5. I did the system load tape. Ran Autoinst, number 3 for FOS, SUBSYS, and PP3. It seemed to restore the FOS correctly, SUBSYS went well (about 34 jobs), but when it got to the part where it backs up the SL, XL, NL, it aborted because it could not find the file AUTOGEN.INSTALL. It does not exist. Any suggestions, besides call an expert?

Ron Horner and Jeff Kell (who are both experts) reply:

:RESTORE *pp3tape;@.install.sys