Number 105 (Update of Volume 9, Issue 2)

3000 group engineer Vance retakes SIB work

MPE/iX star engineer Jeff Vance is back at work inside HP, beating most estimates of recovery time after his serious mountain bike accident this summer. Vance reported that he’s been driving to the HP offices in Cupertino, a little more than three months after he was temporarily paralyzed following a bike crash.

Vance added that he’s getting back to work on the latest HP 3000 System Improvement Ballot request for new CI functions. “I am working with a good engineer in Bangalore, and we are beginning to define the externals for new volinfo(), spoolinfo() and devinfo() CI functions,” Vance said. He plans to attend HP World 2005, but may be dialing back on the radical biking style. He isn’t giving up riding altogether, though.

“I will ride bikes again,” he said. “I just don't know about the more extreme end of the sport. I continue to get a bit better, but as I've been told, the rate of improvement is slower and slower. So, probably no more big ‘bouncing’ on the ‘improvement’ mat, but just slow, steady progress — sort of like a good ol’ 3000.”

2004 delivered critical patches

By the time most HP 3000 customers read this issue of the Online Extra, two years will remain of HP’s 3000 support. That support today includes engineering on patches to fix critical bugs in MPE/iX, even for older versions of the operating system.

Much of the customer base uses MPE/iX 6.5, a release that saw seven critical patches surface from HP’s labs in 2004. While things slow down in many businesses over the year-end holidays, patching becomes more possible. A summary of 6.5 critical patches with 2004 release dates includes the following:

MIRMX23B, a Mirrored Disk patch for the VOLUTIL and COPYVOL commands of MIRVUTIL;

MPELXY8C, which protects from a System Abort (SA)1350 during termination of a process with DEBUG breakpoints set;

MPEMX22B, repairs for MPE’s VOLUTIL and COPYVOL commands;

MPEMX85B, fixes for 7x24 True-Online TurboSTORE/iX;

MPEMXQ1A, which protects against SA 650 or SA 995 when a file size greater than or equal to 4GB is truncated to less than 4GB;

MPELXL5A, which repairs the NEWCI command broken after installing patch MPELXG3;

SMBMXR5A, the security patch to Samba 2.2.8a.

HP’s post-2006 plans for MPE/iX support are still in flux, and the vendor has said it intends to make its patches available, somehow, after it shutters its support service. But it seems prudent to collect the critical patches for an MPE/iX release now, while HP is still hosting the fixes on its HP IT Resource Center Web site. Download (for free) what you might need later, from http://itrc.hp.com. And don’t forget about firmware upgrades you may need for used HP 3000 hardware you’ll bring into your company. Those are out on the ITRC site, too.

Cognos won’t code PowerHouse to MPUX’s features

In our December issue of the 3000 NewsWire, we looked at options for HP 3000 customers who step down the migration path with PowerHouse applications. Migrating customers are grateful to find railings on the technology staircase as they descend into a different world. The 3000’s job differences loom among the largest; MPE/iX job control must be rewritten to work on a target platform such as Windows, Linux or Unix.

Ordina-Denkart’s MPUX is helping users avoid the rewrites of job control. MPUX lets system administrators use the 3000’s command set, as well as supporting MPE/iX intrinsics, on non-3000 environments. The software doesn’t isolate applications or users in an emulation environment, but instead provides Unix, Linux or Windows services to the MPE/iX applications. One of the best ways to employ MPUX is to have an application communicate directly with the MPUX software. Unfortunately, Cognos has told its customers that its PowerHouse language won’t get revised to talk directly to MPUX.

The issue surfaced when 3000 customer Roger Glayzer asked Cognos if MPUX features can be accessed from inside PowerHouse applications. “Since MPUX has been around for a few years, and with the announcement about the 3000 disappearing… we were hoping that MPUX would be able to intercept a command coming out of PowerHouse. If the command was something that MPUX could emulate (ie. STREAM, LISTF, SORT) then MPUX would do its thing.”

Cognos product manager Bob Deskin said the design changes in PowerHouse are too extensive for it to work directly with MPUX. “From a PowerHouse perspective, supporting the full MPUX capability would require a significant development effort because of the internal changes required, Deskin said. “I don't mean that the changes would be difficult but they would be extensive.”

PowerHouse does support Marxmeier Software’s Eloquence database, the work-alike IMAGE replacement for Windows, Linux and Unix environments. But Deskin said PowerHouse “locates the IMAGE calls and simply changes the conditional compile to be based on Eloquence or IMAGE.” To support MPUX in the same way, Cognos “We would have to add something to the dictionary and then — and this is the big job — locate all the calls in our code and add a conditional based on the dictionary entry.”

Migration from the 3000 is a hefty task, one that tools such as MPUX are making possible in the shrinking schedule before HP’s 3000 support ends. Cognos is leaving the PowerHouse intergration with MPUX to Ordina-Denkart and its partners. An MPUX-specific version of PowerHouse “would have required a lot of testing and ensuring that MPUX was a 100 percent MPE/iX emulator,” Deskin said. “Unfortunately we do not have the resources for that, nor do we see that there is enough business to justify the major effort.”

Searching suggestions for MPEX

Once our steady Inside VEsoft columnist Steve Hammond got the lid off the search command options in our November issue, one MPEX user noted a caution about searching with the VEsoft tool.

“Just a note of caution on the Searching and Finding method that Steve wrote about,” wrote Frank Nikoletti of Argyle Diamonds. “If you don’t use the KEEPAMDATES switch in the PRINT command (or have it permanently set somehow), then all of the Access/Modify dates on all files that you have searched (not even just the ones where you found what you were looking for) will be changed. This makes it difficult to the get a realistic picture of when files were ‘really’ last accessed by an application.”

By coincidence, Hammond, who’s been writing about MPEX and other VEsoft utilities for the NewsWire since 2001, outlined more tricks for the MPEX print command in the December issue of the NewsWire.

Intel takes on HP’s Itanium talents

Industry insiders with an eye cocked on the future of Itanium debated the meaning of the latest chapter in HP’s epic saga to move away from PA-RISC processors. The vendor announced that it is pledging $3 billion in research to support development of high-end solutions for Itanium, the architecture that is supposed to drive Unix-based HP 3000 replacements from HP.

At the same time, however, Intel acquired the HP chip design engineers who are working on the project, ending HP’s direct involvement with Itanium hardware design. HP and Intel worked for more than a decade together on the design of processors and compilers for the architecture.

The change in employment for several hundred engineers is no more than a switch of coachmen along HP’s 64-bit trail, say HP officials. Intel “reached agreement with HP to hire HP’s Intel Itanium processor design team based in Ft. Collins, Colo. — strengthening its investment in the Itanium architecture and bolstering the development of multi-core, multi-threaded processors.”

Outside opinion of the Intel-HP move was less cheery. A Reuters report said the two companies “ended their 10-year partnership to co-develop the Itanium chip for server computers, following disappointing sales of the product.”

HP’s press release said the company intends to increase the share of Itanium servers to more than half of all the Business Critical Servers HP sells by December, 2005. The latest data shows that HP sells about one out of every five Business Critical models with Itanium processors.

HP’s promise to make Itanium half of its server business effectively pledges to more than double its Itanium-based sales in one year’s time. To make Itanium a bigger share of HP’s business, customers must buy fewer PA-RISC models — such as the replacement rx7400 models offered to HP 3000 migrating sites — or turn away from the Pentium/Xeon-based Proliant servers that drive lower-capital-cost Windows migrations.

More than doubling the Itanium sales numbers might be possible with the help of Linux growth. But after talking to many HP 3000 SMB customers who are making Windows their target migration platform, it’s difficult for us to see how the more popular Windows/Pentium combination will slide so fast in the next year among HP’s systems.

Intel believes the future of the chip lies in competition with IBM’s Power architecture. IBM has scaled Power from desktop to mainframe in its product line, but Intel believes that Itanium can compete as a mainframe platform.

“Itanium is showing success in the high end, not in the mid-range,” said Intel’s new CEO Paul Otellini in a BusinessWeek interview. “So we're focusing product development, marketing, and software efforts on greater than four-way systems. For a while, we had ambitions to drive it down to two-way servers and workstations. It just doesn't work in terms of the economics of the low end of the industry.”

Itanium remains the only long-term platform for HP-UX, the operating environment HP and its partners promote as a replacement for MPE/iX and the HP 3000. Most HP 3000 customers have plans for no more than four-way systems, even with projections for the increased horsepower demands of Unix or Oracle databases.

HP and Intel decided that the Itanium platform would have a better chance of adoption by other systems vendors if HP distanced itself from the chip’s design. In the BusinessWeek interview, Intel’s Otellini sounded less conflicted about pushing Itanium as a 64-bit mainframe competitor than selling the chip as a platform for 32-bit applications using Itanium’s x86 compatibility mode.

“We have nothing in our existing 32-bit line capability that can compete with Power,” Otellini said. “[Power] is a very high performance line requiring liquid-cooling capabilities. The mainframe isn’t dead. That’s where I'd like to push Itanium over time.”

Retranslate to avoid system aborts

Customers have reported that FREAD and FWRITE integer overflows are being caused by an problem with the HP 3000 patch scripts Patchix, Autopat, and Hpinstl. To avoid the problem, check the version of your patch script before starting the patch process.

The problem surfaces when the Object Code Translated version of the CM procedure MPEFILETYPE in SL.PUB.SYS is bad — SL.PUB.SYS is OCT'd without the NOOVF option.
This problem was caused by the installation of one or more patches.

This has been fixed in:

Patchix version B.01.07 and above for MPE/iX releases 6.5 and 6.0
Patchix version B.02.05 and above of MPE/iX 7.0
Patchix version B.03.00 and above on MPE/iX 7.5
Hpinstal version B.15.00 and above on MPE/iX 7.5
Autoinst version E.14.00 and above on MPE/iX 7.5.

The problem can cause serious side effects. Some programs to abort with "INTEGER OVERFLOW" in unexpected places (typically doing a file system operation, like FWRITE/FREAD). If the program in question happens to be in critical mode, the abort would cause an HP 3000 system abort.

HP has more help on the system abort problem at the following Jazz URL: http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/sloctfix