Number 100 (Update of Volume 8, Issue 9)

HP World 3000 stronghold’s site has shifted

Things are moving fast in the 3000 community’s effort to make a meeting place on the HP World Expo floor next month. Just a few days after lead organizer Alan Yeo reported the booth number to the NewsWire, the site shifted to booth 263. The latest location is a moved up to Booth 821, this time much closer to the Platinum migration partner booths further up front in the show floor — where the Interex interactive map still showed a double-wide booth still unsold, right on top of the Lund-MB Foster-Speedware trio of exhibit spaces.

Regardless of its final location, there will be an HP 3000 community stronghold at HP World — the HP 3000 Community Networking Lounge. The booth will be a place to meet people with interest, experience and answers about all things HP 3000. Recharge laptops, access e-mail, rendezvous with colleagues. Get gossip and giveaways throughout the Expo at the spot to find 3000 customers. The 3000 NewsWire will be giving away free CD cases and draw for free copies of the Robelle “HP 3000 Evolution” desk reference book. Expect more to come from this community effort; it might even be a landing point for a curious squadron of bomber-fighter hats that one 3000 manager is trying to organize. We’ll keep you posted.

Upgrade shows VPlus “gotchas”

While many 3000 customers are deliberating over their response to the call for transition away from the computer, others are simply at work on improving their systems with upgrades. Jim Phillips, IT manager for Therm-O-Link, reported that his upgrade from MPE/iX 6.0 to 7.5 uncovered these surprises about VPlus screen handling:

“We discovered some VPlus ‘features’ that bit us...

“1) We had some programs that call "VTURNOFF" and "VTURNON". The parameters for VTURNON are "comarea" and "termfile". These programs ran successfully under 6.0 just using the "comarea" parameter; however, under 7.5 these programs fail.

“2) We have several forms that use the following field edits for fields that may or may not be numeric:

if match d* then
justify right
fill leading "0"

“Under 6.0 this functioned as expected; that is, if the field contained only digits, it would be right-justified and zero-filled. Under 7.5, if the field was empty, it would also match d* and the edit was applied. This caused some of our programs to act very oddly and it was quite difficult to find the bug.

“In order to fix it I had to change the edit to the following:

if ne $empty then
if match d* then
justify right
fill leading "0"

Why upgrade your Samba?

HP recently released a repaired patch that will upgrade the Samba file and print sharing services for HP 3000s. After we reported in June that patches SMBMXP8A for MPE/iX 6.5, SMBMXP8B for MPE/iX 7.0 and SMBMXP8C for MPE/iX 7.5 are now in beta-test, we wanted to review why you’d want to upgrade to the 2.2.8a version.

Mark Bixby, HP’s open source for MPE/iX guru, explained what the newest Samba delivers to 3000s. “2.2.8a is the very latest & greatest from samba.org and is more current than what is now available on HP-UX. The big new-to-MPE feature of 2.2.8a is support for encrypted passwords via the smbpasswd file. No more Windows registry modifications in order to force use of the 2.0.7 and earlier plaintext passwords, previously the only option available on MPE.

“2.2.8a also brings improved printer integration, fixes for all known security issues, and the ability to configure the MPE filename escape character to something other than "_".”

Ecometry hosts Olympic meeting

E-commerce application provider Ecometry boasted of more than 300 attendees at this summer’s World Conference and Expo, which we previewed in our June issue. Subject to the final count at next month’s HP World, Ecometry’s show was probably the largest single gathering of HP 3000-using customers for the entire year. About 90 percent of the Ecometry customer base uses HP 3000s, although many are in the middle of planning for a transition away from the server. Ecometry has no plans to support MPE/iX beyond December, 2006.

Ecometry’s press release reported the event as a rousing sales-type meeting: “The conference’s Opening Ceremonies began with a procession of Ecometry sponsors and vendors who marched into the General Session auditorium carrying their companies’ flags to the sound of John Williams’ ‘Olympic Theme.’ The audience cheered as Ecometry’s President and CEO John Marrah ran through the hall to the stage carrying a torch, and lit the symbolic flame proclaiming, ‘Let the Ecometry Games begin!”

Marrah made note of Ecometry’s Open Systems Version 7.0 – software which the company called “the most feature rich version of Ecometry to date,” and the first version that sports features unavailable for the MPE/iX servers which the majority of its customers use today. Marrah also unveiled Ecometry’s two flagship R&D projects, Kingdom and Enterprise. Kingdom will focus on advanced functionality for the Point of Sale (POS) module of the Ecometry system.

“The goal of these enhancements is to increase retail staff productivity by improving POS flow,” Marrah said. Enterprise will offer a complete e-commerce platform allowing users to build, deliver and run an E-commerce site requiring only limited programming support.

The conference included 40 breakout sessions, and used its general session time to reinforce the Olympic theme. Keynote Speaker, Dudley “Tal” Stokes, captain of the Jamaican Olympic Bobsled Team that inspired the Disney movie “Cool Runnings,” spoke of his Olympic experience and related his determination and resolve to everyday life. The conference also raised over $10,000 for Kids In Distress, with most of the silent auction items provided by the Ecometry clients and vendors attending the conference.

Acucorp eases path to Oracle, away from HP compiler

Migration work from the HP 3000 demands a database change, and one of the platform’s language suppliers wants to make moving to Oracle easier. Acucorp’s ACUCOBOL-GT development suite has been certified for use with Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Database. The software provides COBOL connectivity to Oracle’s newest products. Acucorp customers can embed SQL statements in a host ACUCOBOL-GT program, then use that program to access Oracle databases through the Oracle Pro*COBOL pre-compiler. The object, as always, is to eliminate application re-engineering and rewriting.

Not all of the discontinuing at HP involves platforms like the HP 3000, although OpenVMS users aren’t feeling confident about their future with HP, either. HP-UX customers recently learned that HP won’t be supporting its own COBOL compiler much longer, so Acucorp is stepping up to welcome the HP-UX users who will need to transition away from the HP 9000 software. “Realizing that as an HP-UX customer you now have a choice of COBOL solution providers,” said Acucorp’s president Pamela Coker, “I would like to invite you to experience what hundreds of other satisfied HP-UX customers have enjoyed over the past 15 years with Acucorp.”

PatchWatch: Get Traceroute back onto 7.5

HP managed to push a MPE.iX 7.5 networking services patch into General Release in mid-June, not an easy thing to do on a 3000 OS release that’s not widely installed yet. The patch NSTHD22 went through six months of beta tests before HP cleared it for general distribution. This is a patch not included in the 7.5 PowerPatch 2 HP begins shipping this month; the PowerPatch carries the superseded patch NSTHD06.

NSTHD22 restores Traceroute to the 7.5 MPE/iX release, a valuable network utility program that got left out of the base release of 7.5. the patch also repairs a series of System Aborts (SAs) surrounding network transport services. The Patchman script for Patch/iX is still the best way to add a patch to an HP 3000 system. Both Patch/iX and the Patchman script are available at the HP Jazz Web site software page, jazz.external.hp.com/src

Analysis: IBM crows about SAP-iSeries success

Late last month IBM celebrated the 1,000th installation of the mySAP business suite on the iSeries system, the server promoted as an alternative to the proven integration of the HP 3000. We reported in June that the iSeries’ eServer i5 would be the first to feature IBM’s new Virtualization Engine and POWER5 processor technologies. (The server even has a TV commercial of its own, something IBM shared with the faithful at this spring’s COMMON user conference.)

But companies buy applications, not platforms, right? SAP was one of the crucial app shortfalls for the 3000 in the early 1990s, as SAP’s programmers failed to port the massive R3 SAP application to the 3000 after a lengthy attempt.

Some in the 3000 community recall SAP’s attempt as less than urgent, perhaps stalled by the size of the HP 3000 base in those days compared to Unix platform possibilities. But another non-Unix platform gathered up the SAP application, as IBM helped engineer mySAP’s arrival for the iSeries several years ago.

IBM held a press conference to announce its SAP milestone for the iSeries, an accomplishment that Big Blue offered as “proof of the turnaround of the iSeries product family.” Non-commodity platforms like the HP 3000 and the iSeries get their share of dings during IT planning meetings because they sometimes don’t offer brand-name apps like SAP. IBM’s press flaks noted that Starwood -- a hospitality leader whose brands include Westin, St. Regis, Sheraton and W hotels -- recently installed an iSeries Model i890 to power its SAP application. The i890 is at the top of the iSeries food chain for power -- or was, until the vendor rolled out the i5 eServers this month. Starwood uses the iSeries to handle payroll for the 50,000 employees in its North American hotels. The mySAP installation also helps local hotel managers better administer properties by providing budget and forecasting data, including room occupancy and average rates.

Regardless of the reason for SAP’s failure to port its application to MPE/iX years ago, the IBM announcement shows how more effort might have helped bolster the 3000’s growth. Luring these brand-name apps to an alternative platform was a job that HP stopped working on for the HP 3000 after a few years. IBM wants even more brand names for the iSeries. Last month the vendor was making much of the newest PeopleSoft World Express release for the eServer i5. (World is an app with a long ERP history on the AS/400 and iSeries; the Express version delivers it along with iSeries hardware for $50,000.) It will be interesting to see how long it takes for IBM to announce 1,000 World Express installations for the iSeries. If nothing else, the vendor is working to leverage its larger base of iSeries servers when it continues to approach vendors like SAP and PeopleSoft.