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

Edited by John Burke

I am trying to find information on the Heat Dissipation for a Model 10 disk array, specifically the maximum load BTUs. Where can I find this information?

Wirt Atmar replies:
You don’t need to reference an HP site for this information. It’s available on the nameplate on the back of your device. BTUs are a unit of work (or energy or heat; the concepts are all equivalent). Kilowatts are a unit of power (work expended per unit time), thus kilowatt-hours (units appropriate for the time integral of power) are equivalent to BTUs.

If we presume that all of the electrical energy flowing into an electrical device is dissipated as heat (which is not only a good first-order approximation, it’s also the most conservative estimate), then the formula of interest is: 1 kilowatt-hour = 3413 BTUs.

That is, a 100W (or 100VA) device will emit at maximum 341 BTU’s in one hour. HP however is conservative in its estimates of power draws, so the real number will probably lie somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of such a number calculated off of the nameplate.

Does the MPE intrinsic FPOINT work on Large Files, those greater than 4Gb?

Gavin Scott replies:
Of course it does. FPOINT takes a record number, and Large Files can’t have any more records than not-Large files, so there’s no issue with FPOINT or any of the rest of the Intrinsics for that matter.

Is it possible to set a variable to the result of an finfo across a DSLINE connection? I want to retrieve the status of a particular file on the remote system.

Donna Garverick replies:
You cannot do it directly. One way of doing it, however, is to create a file equation on the remoted system that includes a ‘nodespec’ (read ‘help all’ for file) for the originating system. Then use this command

echo ![finfo(‘myfile’,’myparm’)]>*myfeq

That magic file equation will put the information on your originating system. if it’s a one-liner file, it’s fairly easy to get the input: (input myvar < finfofle). It involves some work, but it’s not too bad.

I have a port in an HP 3000 and I want to know the application that is currently using that port. Is there any command that can show me the applications accessing a particular port?

Kevin Miller and Jeff Kell reply:
:sockinfo.net.sys

Enter ‘c’ for ‘call sockets.’ Listeners are shown in port order.

I recently had a problem with an IMAGE B-Tree index. A search like “Z@” (where Z was greater than all present key values) took a long time to come back. Four minutes for the DBFIND! On our test system I tried dropindex/addindex on a restored copy of the database and that seems to have fixed the problem. This index is the built-in IMAGE kind, not Omnidex or Superdex. There were 1.4 million entries in the manual master dataset. So should we regularly re-index our IMAGE B-Trees?

Jerry Fochtman replies:
This is one of those “it depends” answers. If the dataset is fairly stable without a lot of add/delete, then it could be re-built less frequently than the index for a set that experiences frequent key add/change/delete activity. Keep in mind that KSAM/KSAMXL operates using a ‘key’ area and a ‘data’ area. The key area is dynamically maintained as a balanced tree whenever values are added/removed. However, the data portion is a ‘first-come, first-serve’ approach so it’s possible that the data for logically adjacent values are spread all over this area causing IO to be extensive. Especially when doing wild-card qualifications and it becomes necessary for the data entries to be retrieved and evaluated against the request.

So the answer is yes, it is a good idea to re-built the indexes periodically. But at what frequency would have to be determined on an individual basis simply because the dynamics of the data and the affect it has on data locality are generally not easily predictable.

I have searched the archives and find only a single reference to Device Class Limit from 1996 that listed it as 450. Is that number still valid, and if not, what is the current limit?

Guy Paul replies:
You can find this on HP's Jazz Web site at jazz.external.hp.com/papers/limits/os_limits.html