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Ron Seybold, Editor In Chief
Call us at 512-657-3264 if you have any questions about receiving the Online Extra. If you don't want us to e-mail you this file in the future -- because you prefer to read the Online Extra at the Always Online Web site -- just drop me a note at rseybold@zilker.net.
Ron Seybold
Editor In Chief
IN THIS MONTH'S EXTRA
Editorial: Go ahead HP -- dare to compare
Watch out for the next silver bullet: Linux
HP makes the 3000 renaissance official in annual report
DeskManager is really Y2K compliant, despite HP's info
From NetMail's makers -- a guide to spam block services
It's not DBUTIL that's broke in PowerPatch 5
Wanted from CFE: An HP variable to help handle HFS
Amisys sites have unsupported PowerHouse version
HP reads Apache/iX mail daily -- and it should
Read the LaserROM contents on the Web
Get your free command files from Tim Ericson's page
Editorial: Go ahead HP -- dare to compare
The more complex computing gets, the more it needs an objective judge of the relative merits of its environments. That's why we long for the days when HP computing operations competed with each other, in the healthy, quality-building way you might see between squads on a basketball team. In sports you can get an objective judge of talents -- your coach. In computing, it's as if each one of those strings of players had their own coach -- and those coaches were constantly replacing each other's players at timeouts.
Okay, it might not be reasonable to expect HP's Unix or NT managers to say something praiseworthy about anything other than what they sell. These days you can't get them to say anything about the alternatives at all. I admit it's an improvement over the days when HP's Unix business stoked its ovens by feeding live 3000 customers into the fires. But now HP has gotten into the habit of avoiding any kind of comparison between its solutions. Everything is supposed to be a good choice, and you can always solve a deficiency in one environment with a solution from another platform. HP still doesn't seem to understand how this ratchets up the complexity in customer shops. Customers do, and they are loath to add unfamiliar environments to mission-critical duties in HP 3000 shops unless they're forced to do so by missing features -- like a secure MPE/iX Web server.
Years ago, in the last springtime before the NewsWire was born, I wrote an article about how the HP 9000s really weren't any cheaper than HP 3000s, once you factored in all the software you needed to add to the Unix system. HP CSY manager George Stachnik helped me research that one, comparing on price and features. I still hear people talk about that article today, even though its figures are way out of date.
This kind of comparison is what customers go through today on their own, gathering research like picking up bread crumbs along a haunted forest trail. It's good work for paid consultants to do for HP 3000 sites. Trouble is, many HP 3000 sites don't have that kind of consulting in their budgets. They're used to making a handful of MIS staff serve the needs of thousands of workers. Consultants seem to be needed for the other, more complex environments. Their 3000 works with a lot less resource.
The people who have this kind of consulting budget are the ones pushing what's new to the game, or priced in a completely different, higher range. When you don't have track record to rely on like the HP 3000's quarter century, one way to give yourself credibility is to have an outside, impartial expert judge what's the best computer choice for the project at hand. More than a few HP 3000 sites tell of having an outside consultant come in and brand the 3000 as old technology, then suggesting that Unix, NT or the latest flavor of the month is a more appropriate choice for the 21st Century. Of course, the Unix technology is even older than MPE, and HP 9000 and HP 3000 hardware architecture is identical. Only one has continuous customers dating back into the 70s, though.
One place where you can see the old school comparison still happening is in the IBM marketplace. Friends of ours recently invited us to a training event for IBM systems managers, just to cruise through as tourists. One eye-opening talk came from an IBM manager comparing NT's ERP chops to what you could get with Unix solutions. He was selling the latter, and his comments opened some of NT's battle scars in the ERP marketplace. Sure, he was biased. But he was willing to compare, and people in the room took notes to take back and defend their Unix solutions. More than a few could report, "This is what IBM told me," when they'd get asked "Who says your current solution is better than the latest thing?"
That's the kind of comparison we wish our readers and this market could count on. We could do it -- in fact, we'd love to. But our advocacy for the 3000 platform leaves our credentials to compare well within rock throwing distance. No, to leave yourself outside that heaving range you need to be somebody with a broader mission that ours. You need to sell or service multiple platforms. We can think of two candidates for this job: the Interex user group, and HP. We'll leave the requests for Interex's comparisons between HP 3000s and other solutions to the members of that user group. As for HP, we'd like to suggest some seasoned HP manager cook up an environment comparison talk like we heard from IBM. Sure, IBM's healthy competition drives up the cost of sales, but it also uncovers a lot of facts -- like picking up a whole loaf of bread instead of gathering it one crumb at a time.
Watch out for the next silver bullet: Linux
If you're wondering what the next silver bullet might be in computing -- that's the solution that's supposed to resolve your remaining problems and surface as the ultimate choice -- watch out for Linux. It's got the ear of programmers tired of being disappointed by the last few silver bullets: Unix and NT. And even the hardware vendors seem to want to jump aboard, led by IBM.
Thinking that Linux is the answer to mission-critical computer needs exposes you to just another heady rush like the one that Unix and NT promised. It's chief asset is that it isn't controlled by a vast committee with deadly, byzantine pockets of differences -- like Unix with its many dialects. And Linux appears to have one big advantage over NT -- it's not mired in business decisions by a single company about release schedules and features.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that Open Source software like Linux -- built by volunteers worldwide who work in concert -- can be the next silver bullet. It's unclear how much profit, if any, lies in Linux and Open Source software. And while you may not care much about the profitability of software suppliers, they do, and they're the ones hiring the experts. And you need experts, full-time ones, to keep up with a technical world more complex each week. HP is offering Open Source software for Web servers on the HP 3000 now. It's an admirable effort, but Apache still has bugs. HP is now assigning its engineers to fix them, something no amount of volunteers has been able to do because the bugs lie inside the operating system only HP can fix.
We'd like to see Open Source take its rightful place in the computing environment, but we doubt that it will be to provide a commercial-grade operating environment. Open Source will give a jump-start to ideas nobody wants to pay for but everybody needs, like file-sharing services between NT and the HP 3000. We find it fascinating that HP cannot give you a briefing on the 3000's connectivity without mentioning Samba, but couldn't find a business case to offer these services two years ago.
Profit is the most essential element of any software offering. The next time you find yourself stranded with a technically superior program, dumped because its makers couldn't make it pay, you will see this. We think Linux is a great sandbox with lots of potential for experimentation, sort of a 21st Century Unix. Betting your business on its success is a gamble not even the players in the computing industry who cover lots of bets are willing to take yet. If you want a place to put Linux, let it cover the Microsoft-Says shortcomings of NT or the inconsistencies of Unix. Watch for commercially supported applications and tools while you judge its potential for more mission-critical tasks. And be sure to give Linux the demerits it may earn if it gets too many dialects, like Unix did. The last thing this industry needs is another complex computing choice, claiming to the best yet.
HP makes the 3000 renaissance official in annual report
After waiting for several years, HP 3000 customers finally got validation of their investment in HP's 1998 Annual Report. Released after the New Year, the document carries a modest mention of HP's longest selling business system. Page 25 of the report to investors, under Computers and Peripherals, says:
"HP3000
1998 marked the renaissance of the HP3000. HP announced that the product would support the Intel Architecture (IA-64) platform, assuring a roadmap to the future for this 26 year old technology classic. HP also announced that it would target five new vertical markets for the HP3000 -- mail order, health care, manufacturing, credit unions and airlines -- and subsequently acquired Open Skies, Inc. which provides reservation solutions for small and medium- sized airlines."
If you've tired
of having the stockholders of HP lead its product parade in this
decade, this small paragraph should give you hope. Analysts continue
to predict a great homogenization of computing choices, a prediction
that won't wear out its welcome in boardrooms anytime soon. C Choices
with lots of buzz attached, from Linux to NT to SAP, will claim to be
eventual winners by acclamation. The truth is that the right tool for
the right job remains common sense. We applaud HP's top management
for waking to the bright light of the 3000's new dawn.
DeskManager is really Y2K compliant, despite
HP's info
Despite what you may have
heard from HP's own Systems Engineers, HP DeskManager, known as HP
Desk or just Desk by its customers who run it on HP 3000s, will be
Year 2000 compliant. In fact, it already is, provided you load the
latest set of patches for 3.xx version of the software.
HP has set up a Web site to
let customers track this kind of information, and it will even let
you type in a product name to check on its Y2K status. That's where
the trouble cropped up in this latest Y2K scare. Desk goes by several
names, but only the official HP moniker -- HP Open DeskManager -- had
the correct Y2K information. If you typed DeskManager, or Desk, in
the search window, you could learn your mail system was not going to
make the 2000 cut.
If HP is going to run this
kind of service for its customers, and even for its own engineers,
it's going to have to do better at it than this. We'd give you the
Web address for the site, but we think the above mistake indicates
some revision is needed in the content. In the meantime you can keep
in mind that HP chose to make a mail program that wasn't Y2K
compliant ready for the next millennium. We think that says something
about the concept of running e-mail -- a mission-critical application
these days -- on your HP 3000.
From NetMail's makers -- a guide to spam
block services
The leading supplier of HP
3000 mail software these days isn't HP, of course. You can hardly get
HP to admit it even has e-mail for the 3000. To find the innovation
you need to talk with 3k Associates, which makes NetMail/3000, as
well as the DeskLink software that gives DeskManager Internet
capability.
As proof of the prowess at
3k, look over a summary of the latest spam-blocking services that
e-mail administrators can use to keep their servers from hosting
pyramid schemes and porn links. Check out this report from Chris
Bartram on which services keep spammers off your system:
"MAPS only lists known
SPAM sites; they are just beginning to add open relays and dial-up
hosts. There are other services that provide those lists that have
been around for a while.
You'll find that MAPS itself
is very conservative in who they block. You'll likely never get a
false-positive from their list; but you'll also block VERY LITTLE
spam. Estimates I've seen rate about 3-5%.
ORBS (formerly 'dorkslayers')
is the service that listed open relays. They had an auto-submission
web-site where suspected open servers could be submit- ted for
automatic testing (and listing if tested positive). They subsequently
caught A LOT more spam, but you will see false positives from
organizations that aren't aware their servers are open (or are too
incompetent to fix them). ORBS was shut down a couple months ago by
it's upstream, but is back as orbs.org now.
ORCA is a list of dialup
ports. You use it the same as MAPS or ORBS; it lists dialup ports at
most known ISPs. It has a fairly high spam-elimination rate and very
low false positives (except for ISPs that use it and might find their
OWN dialups listed; in which case they have to specifically allow
their own). Dialup ports should never connect to your SMTP server
directly; all legit users go through a known/trusted smtp relay at
their ISP.
IMRSS is yet another service
that arose when ORBS got shut down. It is far more aggressive in
listing open mail relays (reported relays get auto-tested, along with
ALL other machines in the same IP block). This service has almost
twice the servers listed (already) that ORBS had and is growing fast.
It eliminates the most SPAM (probably close to 80%) but will also
have the highest rate of false positives. No stats available on those
yet (it's only been online a few weeks).
Our mail server
(NetMail/3000) allows each site to selectively turn on any (or all)
of these filters. We're running ours (at 3kassociates.com) with all filters
enabled for the time being. NetMail keeps an errorlog file which
records all mail 'errors' - including messages refused as spam - and
records the source that caused the refusal. We've had a few episodes
where relatively large ISPs got "filtered"... to the
surprise of some of their clients. You'd be amazed at how many LARGE
ISPs are too incompetent to properly secure their mail servers (even
aside from the ones that can but just don't ever get *around* to it).
We point out to the "refusee" why their mail bounced, and
that chances are they'll have problems reaching lots of other sites
too unless they either switch ISPs or get the mail server in question
fixed. We also modified our mail server recently to include the
respective services' URL in the SMTP error message to aid people when
they do get mail bounced.
See web pages at http://maps.vix.com, http://www.orbs.org, http://www.imrss.org for info on the
various services."
And we might add, see 3k at
http://www.3kassociates.com for details on
NetMail/3000. A free two-user license is available for trial.
It's not DBUTIL that's broke in PowerPatch
5
Last month we noted that
MPE/iX 5.5 PowerPatch 5 has a bug that can cripple databases, and we
described it as the DBUTIL bug. While the PowerPatch is a bad one --
HP stopped shipping 3000s for about a week until they got a better
PowerPatch 6 available -- the bug is not in DBUTIL. That IMAGE
utility was one of the victims of a broken performance patch to
MPE/iX. People tended to discover the database-eater when they ran
DBUTIL and got scrambled data.
PowerPatch 5's problems might
seem like old news to some. But we just saw a Smith-Gardner &
Associates customer mailing list message where a manager was ready to
load the broken software as an update. SGA customers, like some
others in the 3000 market, rely just about exclusively on their
application supplier for every bit of 3000 information. It's a sign
of how much there is to know about the 3000 when something as
crippling as PowerPatch 5 is still sitting on some customer desks,
waiting to be installed.
Wanted from CFE: An HP variable to help
handle HFS
We recently bumped up against
another shortcoming in the FTP program for the HP 3000, FTP/iX.
(There are so many to count over the past two years.) The latest flaw
in this file transfer software keeps a manager from designating HFS
as the default file directory type during a transfer. (Honest, all we
want to do is transfer our Web site pages to our HP 3000 Web server
using stock FTP commands. Can't do it, because FTP wants to consider
everything that's uploaded a file in the MPE namespace). Frankly, we
think that FTP/iX is something of a gamble for anybody transferring
anything to a 3000, since each release appears to have these
eccentricities.
Our friends at 3k Associates
and Allegro Consultants did our homework for us on this one, and
Allegro's Michael Hensley found a way to conceal this MPE beauty
mark. It will take HP to write it, but it could go a long way to fix
other 3000 problems, too. We'll let Hensley describe it:
"I was a beta-tester of
the latest FTP, and I can just about guarantee there is no way to
make the server default to the HFS namespace (POSIX and HFS aren't
the same thing).
"One of my top
enhancement requests is to be able to set a variable that would tell
all HP utilities which *can* handle HFS names to *assume* HFS names.
My hope is that third-party vendors would then follow suit, and query
the same variable.
"We actually outlined
more than one mode:
HFS-ONLY: all filenames must
be entered in HFS syntax. For example, CATALOG.PUB.SYS and catalog
are nonexistent files; you'd have to specify /SYS/PUB/CATALOG or (if
you are in the /SYS/PUB directory/group) CATALOG.
HFS-FIRST: Try to open the
file first as an HFS-named file. If none is found, look for it
following the MPE namespace rules.
MPE-FIRST: Convert the
filename to MPE namespace and try to open it first; if not found, try
the filename as specified in the HFS namespace.
MPE only: only look in the
MPE namespace.
In all cases, names starting
with "." or "/" would force an HFS-ONLY
search."
It's a real pleasure to have
such technical talent specify, for free, what would help the HP 3000
deliver on fundamental services like no-nonsense FTP. We'd be even
more pleased to see the foundling CFE program at HP, where the HP
Support group pays for 3000 enhancements, do this one quickly. The
3000 division is pretty busy with PA-8500 engineering on MPE/iX 7.0.
We'd like to see some engineering outside of CSY get this HFS
variable done -- to prove CFE can lighten CSY's load, and repair the
3000's file exchange services.
Amisys sites have unsupported PowerHouse
version
Cognos has been pulling
support out from under its many users of PowerHouse 7.29 for the last
six weeks, dropping all development support of that version of the
software as of Dec. 31, 1998. (We heard a rumor that the software
wasn't copy-protected until its latest 8.19 version -- but we're
certain that couldn't be the reason to drop that 7.29C version
promised as Y2K-ready a full year before the millennium shift).
The demise of 7.29C might
have more impact on HP sites than just those still using PowerHouse
for in-house development. Amisys customers are saddled with 7.29C8
for Amisys 9.4 as of this month, since the health care software has
big chunks of PowerHouse and Quiz within. Cognos hadn't been
contacting the Amisys customers about dropping support on the older
version, and they couldn't tell us what they planned to do to help
the Amisys users make a supported transition. We still wonder what
Amisys has been told about 7.29C support by Cognos.
HP reads Apache/iX mail daily -- and it
should
HP is putting its Netscape
FastTrack porting team to work to make Apache the next Web server
supported for an HP 3000. In case you've lost count, HP hasn't had a
supported Web server to sell or bundle for the 3000 since the summer
of 1997. We heard there's been a little growth in the Internet during
that time, so it's a good thing this summer is going to end the Web
server wait. Perhaps someone at HP can think up something to do with
the Web and HP 3000s in the meantime. We saw something in a
commercial during a basketball game about e-commerce, but we think
that's an IBM brand product.
Meanwhile, HP has made an
unsupported version of Apache/iX available for download from its CSY
Jazz Web site. The 1.3.3 version is at http:
//jazz.external.hp.com/src/apache/apache_readme.html and the page
includes a few eye-openers about the state of the software. Maybe
it's a corner case, but HP reports that a defect in fopen() can keep
Apache from delivering a Web page on occasion. Users just see
"Access Denied" instead of the page they hoped for. HP is
reading customer mail on Apache/iX everyday, so long as it's sent to
apacheix@cup.hp.com. Fixing fopen() is obviously key to getting
Apache/iX working for supported use. Perhaps a few messages to the
above e-mail will help HP make a good business case for the repairs
-- if that's necessary.
Read the LaserROM contents on the Web
HP has begun to make most of
its documentation available over the Web in some way, and a new
resource was uncovered by an HP engineer in Bangalore, India.
Contents of the old HP LaserROM -- now superseded by the Instant
Information CD shipped with MPE/iX 6.0 -- are just a click away.
Browse to http://docs.hp.com/mp
eix/docs5/ix5000.htm to read those manuals no longer being
printed and still unavailable from Instant Ignition. Software
providers like Wirt Atmar of AICS Research are finding such Web
access to documentation helps their customers, too. Atmar noted after
browsing to the LaserROM site:
"I now always keep a Web
browser open to the manuals when I'm working and find that I now have
greater and more immediate access to the manuals than I have ever had
in the past when the manuals were paper- or laser-based."
"But more importantly,
in just the last half-month or so that the manuals have been on the
Web, they've already allowed me a half-dozen times to show remote
customers the things they've needed to do to turn telnet and network
printing on in their HP 3000s. Most people aren't using these
features yet -- and they're far too nice not to be using -- simply
because they don't have access to the documentation for some reason
or another. Having universal access to the manuals is going to make a
great deal of difference, and I'm not exaggerating how much easier
they've already made it for me to help other people get the new
features of 5.5 up and running."
Get
your free command files from Tim Ericson's page
In its own version of Open
Source software design, the HP 3000 community has a great resource
for command files, those auto-magic scripts that make just about
anything easier on MPE systems. Tim Ericson gave a great talk at HP
World last year about how to use command files, and he's become a
Command File Czar since the conference with a Web page full of the
shortcuts. Magic at the Ericson page includes date routines,
system-wide variables from John Krussel of Nordstrom's, an automated
FTP sender, system monitoring and a script that prevents more than
one logon for any user/account combination. Browse to http://
www.denkor.com/hp3000/command_files/samples.html to save some
time managing your HP 3000.