HP continues its improvements to the 3000

January 2005

HP continues its improvements to the 3000

Jeff Vance of HP’s 3000 group posted an Internet message to the OpenMPE and 3000-L mailing lists updating customers about the company’s work on MPE/iX enhancement requests. Several items that were only being planned last year now have delivery dates of this spring. The top-rated enhancement in the System Improvement Balloting (SIB), helping the 3000’s network printing work with non-HP printers, is now being coded. Vance said HP intends “to have a patch available by Spring ’05.”

The No. 2 request on last year’s ballot is also scheduled for this spring, when HP will make FTP services on the 3000 capable of more granular control. HP is doing a full implementation of the ftpusers and a partial implementation of ftpaccess. Ftpusers, which controls which users are allowed access to the FTP server, is complete and ready for system-level testing. The ftpaccess command noretrieve is finished, and Vance added that “We are coding a subset of the other ftpaccess features, including logging ftp commands and file transfers, the command deny feature, and possibly a few more. As with network printing, we intend to be finish the FTP work in the Spring ‘05 timeframe.”

Also promised for this spring is the package of CI Functions — SPOOLINFO, VOLINFO, and DEVINFO to report on spoolfiles, LDEVs, and volumes — that rounded up the bottom of the 2004 SIB ballot. Vance also told customers that HP is including source trees and build scripts for releases of the open source products Samba, Apache, sendmail and others on the 3000. An update of the DNS tool BIND later this year will also include source code.

HP is still making up its mind about the project to enhance MPE/iX so its SCSI commands can support “one IO at a time” connections, as well as links to SCSI devices not currently supported on the 3000. Vance said HP’s investigation to validate the request is complete; the vendor will decide next month if it will staff up the project.

One enhancement has been delivered. There’s a new tool available today to report on the firmware levels in the 3000’s Fast/Wide SCSI and MFIO multifunction cards. Posted on HP’s Jazz Web site at jazz.external.hp.com/src (scroll down to the FWSCSI link), the tool “only reports firmware revisions for NIO F/W SCSI, thus it is not intended for A- and N-Class systems. Recommended firmware 3728 or 3944, contact your support provider for updates.” The firmware tool may later be distributed as part of the TELESUP account on HP’s MPE/iX FOS tapes.