Number 47 (Update of Volume 5, Issue 4)

Welcome to our 47th monthly edition of Online Extra — the e-mail update of our articles in recent issues of the 3000 NewsWire, plus items that have surfaced since we mailed our previous First Class issue (January, 2000). We e-mail our subscribers this file between the First Class issues they receive by mail, updating stories and adding articles that have developed between issues.

Ron Seybold
Editor in Chief

HP ponders how to sell its N-Class quickly

At the HP 3000 Solutions Symposium this week, HP asked its users how it might structure the offering of its new N-Class e3000 servers to sell more of them in the first six months of next year. The question surfaced when HP learned that few of the Symposium attendees planned to buy or upgrade to an N-Class as soon as the system is offered. (HP's Dave Snow did a show-of-hands survey at the Management Roundtable event at the Symposium.)

The obvious answer to the sales challenge is for HP to make the new system priced attractively. But the amount of research and development the division has put into the new systems is substantial, and a head-turning introductory price seemed unlikely for the powerful servers. HP is estimating the new systems will be more than 30 percent faster than the whole-hog Series 997 12-way units just introduced this week.

Customers at the Symposium were suggesting that a different model for MPE/iX license transfers might be a great motivation to spark their interest. Paying an uplift charge to get your operating system onto faster hardware is a long 3000 tradition. Customers were suggesting it's a tradition they don't have to endure on Windows NT systems, although nobody will suggest that NT is as good a business computing choice as MPE/iX. But questioning traditions on pricing may be the start of a new approach to selling the HP 3000 now that it's added the e.

Snow kept probing at the roundtable to see if there were other things keeping customers from buying the N-Class system other than user license pricing. Customers believe the third party software providers take the lead from HP on pricing, and HP's eliminating the license uplift during an upgrade might set an example for the rest of the marketplace.

"We are doing a lot of evaluation of how we're handing the N-Class server pricing," Snow said. "It's an interesting question of whether we want to bet on increased volumes of hardware revenue as traded off against loss of revenue for not having those user license step-ups. It's good to hear there are a lot of people who would purchase hardware platforms if we were able to provide that seamless transfer. We want a cleaner way of representing our pricing when we come out with the N-Class."

A 4-user license is now available

CSY keeps working on lowering the cost of HP 3000s, and evidence surfaced at the Solutions Symposium. A new 4-user license is available for MPE/iX and IMAGE or Allbase databases. The price for the OS and database is at previously-unquoted levels. On a the low-end 9x8 systems, you can get the software needed for $2,995, or $3,995 with Allbase. (If you can manage without a database, MPE/iX now sells for $1,995 by itself on the 9x8s.)

If you consider that HP's list price for the Series 918RX CPU — not counting disk, tape, console or UPS — is just $800, piecing together a small HP e3000 for under $6,000 feels like a good possibility. We're even thinking of giving it a try here at the NewsWire.

9x7s off support by early 2002

One note dropped during the Symposium: You need to make plans for replacing your 9x7 systems as soon as you can, because in about a year they won't be supported by HP. Dave Snow of CSY confirmed that the support for the venerable Nova-class systems — in wide use among the customer base since 1992 — ends on April 1, 2002. Finding a home for your old system might be a high priority. The closer to that date you get, the weaker its resale and trade-in value will get. Even Phoenix 3000, the authorized used system distributor HP set up last year, isn't all that interested in buying 9x7 systems.

A note on FLOCK and FREAD

John Alleyn-Day sent us a note clarifying our Hidden Value item in the December issue. Day said, "in December Costas Anastassiades and Tony Summers write:

"......instead of FLOCKing we .. flush the buffers (FCONTROL 7)."

Although this would be fine when reading a single record, it is not advisable in the situation being discussed, namely reading sequentially by key. In this case, another user could very easily update the file in between two FREADS, so it should always be locked. This actually can get quite complex if records are being read and displayed. After each screenful, one must unlock (for what I hope are obvious reasons) and the next read has to relock and take account of the fact that all kinds of changes may have been made to the file in the interim."

Getting an 8-digit date from COBOL

Our readers take such good care of us, and each other. Glen Cole sent us a note about how to get current 8-digit dates from COBOL on the 3000, clarifying an item we ran in last month's Extra (No. 46). Cole said:

"The piece begins:

> Tom Brandt of NorthTech Systems offers a primer on how to get an
> 8-digit date (the only safe kind to use, now) from an HP 3000 with
> COBOL:
>
> "Use the CURRENT-DATE function to get an 8-digit date, as follows:

Note that this is not necessarily as straightforward as it appears. The problem is that the date changes at "midnight," but the question is, "whose midnight is this, anyway?"

The page at

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/doc3k/B3150090013.11820/124

notes the issues:

- the variable TZ (historically used on UNIX systems for "Time Zone") must be set. If not set, the value "EST5EDT" is used (but set it anyway :).

- the hardware clock must be set to Greenwhich Mean Time (GMT), aka Universal Coordinated Time (UTC)."

Cole also noted there was a typo in the URL given at the end of the No. 46 piece as well; it should be http://docs.hp.com. Our thanks to Glen for backing us up on this one.

Apache moves on, even as it lands on 6.5

HP's Mark Bixby offered notice of a new version of the Apache Web server available online, but it's not the one that HP promises to support on your HP e3000. It will run under MPE/iX, but it's a bit in front of the 1.3.4 version bundled with the 6.5 MPE/iX. Bixby said in an Internet posting:

"Apache 1.3.11 is now available from http://www.apache.org, and will compile without modification for MPE.

The major new MPE functionality is support for DSO modules -- modules loaded dynamically from NMXLs instead of being statically linked into the main HTTPD NMPRG.

The official CSY version of Apache remains at 1.3.4, which is currently available from Jazz, and will be shipping with 6.5 FOS. Just like the official CSY version, 1.3.11 requires 6.0 and patch MPEKX86I

PHP gets a port to the HP e3000

Bixby, an HP CSY engineer who ported Apache to the system and several other key software products before joining HP last year, said he didn't have enough time to port that 1.3.11 Apache to MPE/iX. but he made up for the lack of time almost immediately by getting another useful Web tool ported to the 3000, in a matter of hours.

NewsWire TestDrive editor Shawn Gordon said, "My web designer uses PHP a lot, and I didn't really pay attention until recently to what was going on. PHP is a lot like Cold Fusion, except more it seems, and has database access. It is a component of Apache, and if it could either use JDBC or ODBC or someone could "teach" it about Image, this could be a really cool tool."

Bixby said on the same weekend, "Well, I just ported it this morning. :-) It took all of 4 hours, with most of that time being spent waiting for things to execute. You can grab it from:

http://www.bixby.org/ftp/pub/mpe/apache-1.3.9-php-3.0.14.tar.Z or
ftp://ftp.bixby.org/pub/mpe/apache-1.3.9-php-3.0.14.tar.Z

This is a "geeks only" release without any fancy namby-pamby INSTALL script. It is meant to be untarred into a PUB group of an APACHEFW account.

I've only done the equivalent of a "power on" PHP test by trying out the data.php3 example of the time/date functions. I have not tried to run the full test suite.

None of the zillions of add-on packages that PHP supports have been included.

Re-running either the Apache configure script or the PHP configure script will likely undo a few hand-tweaks I had to make in order to get things to compile. This port didn't break any new ground; it was just the same old tedious things, plus lots of waiting while you rerun configure scripts.

I've never used PHP before until today. This port investigation would best be continued by an experienced PHP user (i.e. somebody other than me). Hint: porting isn't that hard, especially since I've already done the foundation work for you in this case. :-)

This is solely a Mark Bixby personal freeware production, and no current or future support by HP should be implied."

You can get a good primer on how PHP can help in your Web development from HotWired news, which runs the Webmonkey Web designer's site: http://go.hotwired.com/webmonkey/00/05/index2a.html/hf200006

An FTP alternative for the 3000

Our February net.digest column by John Burke notes the problems with HP's current implementation of FTP client on the HP 3000, and we just got word of a new commercial alternative. If you are looking for an alternative client, you might want to check out data trader Enterprise from ZING/SOFT. Uwe Rudloff of ZING/SOFT Inc. (888.833.1398 in the US, or Web at www.zingsoft.com) says "data trader is an FTP replacement product for MPE/iX which will also talk to external FTP servers."

How to succeed in getting a Classic Y2K-safe

HP made an effort to help customers running unsupported MPE V 3000s get into Year 2000 with a special release of MPE V, and NewsWire reader Stan Sieler reported on the results -- with some notes to help on the installation. He said in an Internet posting:

"If any of you took advantage of HP's offer of getting MPE V Release 40, (the "Y2K Safe" version of MPE V), and haven't installed it yet, then I have some notes that you should find interesting.

(If you didn't get your Y2K Safe MPE V, email Allan Hertling at allan_hertling@hp.com)


0. 3P Patches?
--------------

If your goal is to get Release 40 installed, you don't need to bother with the 3P patches you may have received. I simply installed 3P, and then did the Turbo Update to Release 40, and then installed the Release 40 patches.


1. TUINSTAL Y2K bug
-------------------

The Turbo Update mechanism has a Y2K bug in it. TUINSTAL builds the file TUSYSDMP, which builds a new SL and tries to create a SYSDUMP tape with a partial backup. If run today (8 Feb 2000), the partial backup would be specified incorrectly as 2/8/0 ... and STORE (which is used by SYSDUMP) doesn't accept a single digit year.

Workarounds:

1) change system date to 1999-12-31 before running TUINSTAL
(note: you may have to purge TUSYSDMP if it's already been built)

or

2) edit TUSLINFO prior to running TUINSTAL and change the line
towards the end with "$$/$$/$$" to "02/04/00" (or some such) ...note: I haven't tested to see if TUNINSTALL will complain if it can't find the $$/$$/$$ line.


2. Release 40 Patches
---------------------

There are 7 patches on the Release 40 patch tape. Accompanying the tape is a list of the patches ... these are also the names of the files to stream to install each patch!

Notes:

1) Be sure to restore the patches into PATCH.TELESUP!
(They're on the tape as @.PATCH40.TELESUP)

2) Don't rely on setting LIMIT to 1! Each job has a ";HIPRI",
and each builds a new file called "PATCH1JJ" (or some such), and streams it with HIPRI! I.e., it you attempt to minimize your time at the console by streaming all the jobs at once, you'll regret it! (Been there, done that :)

3) INFDVA7B and TRVDVA8B both replace RAPID000.PUB.SYS ...
the latter with a bigger file than the former. My *guess* is that TRVDVA8B should be installed second.

4) BBRDVA1B, RPRDVB0A, and SIMANY5B each build a new SYSDUMP tape and
require a coldload. I streamed the other 5 jobs first (one at a time), then did:

stream BBRDVA1B
COLDLOAD from the tape

stream RPRDVB0A
COLDLOAD from the tape

stream SIMANY5B
COLDLOAD from the tape

did a manual SYSDUMP with date 0 and "@.@.@"

If you're ambitious, you could combine the three patches into one job (with one sysdump/coldload)

3. Disk Space
-------------

I didn't want to risk my existing disks/system, so I bought a used Coyote (HP 6000 670H ... 670 MB?), and setup a single disk system. After installing just the 3P FOS tape, FREE5 reported 2,348,785 available sectors (573 MB) ... before installing the SUBSYS tape!

After going to Release 40, installing the subsystems, and installing the Release 40 patches, I have about 1,600,000 sectors free (383 MB)."

Doug Werth of Beechglen Consulting added his own field notes to Sieler's, noting that the TUINSTAL bug has been documented by HP:

"This is one of the documented Y2K issues with MPE/V. You cannot use SYSDUMP for partial backups based on modify date, only STORE. Which is why it is labeled Y2K Safe, not Y2K compliant." Werth added another workaround for the bug:

"As an alternative I used a third workaround. Since the TUINSTAL process doesn't operate like AUTOINST or PATCHIX (there is no Phase II restore) I decided to edit the sysdump job and tell it *not* to store any files at all." He also commented on the Release 40 Patches, "I was disappointed that there was no supported method for applying all of the patches at once. I would much rather have had an AUTOPAT type of script where it prompts for each patch to name. I can't complain though -- HP gave it away for systems that were no longer supported. All in all I thought it went very well."