SIGSYSMAN: alive and well, and energized

SIB accomplishments lead good news at HP World

By John Burke

There was good news to report on several fronts at this year’s SIGSYSMAN meeting. The good news included new high-availability announcements and the completion of several items from this year’s SIB. Flash back for a moment to HP World 2000, when CSY had to report that not a single item on the SIB had even been worked on. You can understand why optimism was high this year after six months’ worth of positive developments from CSY. This year’s meeting filled the room and all two hours allotted. And then some.

SIGSYSMAN Chair Donna Garverick noted that while SIGSYSMAN has its own official mail list server, the de-facto list server for the SIG’s discussions is 3000-L (archives of messages and a Web interface to post messages are at raven.utc.edu/Archives/hp3000-l.html).

Elections were the next order of business. At SIG3000, in February 2001, an attempt was made to combine SIGSYSMAN and SIGMPE. After much discussion a vote was taken and, by a significant majority, it was decided that SIGSYSMAN and SIGMPE should remain separate. After offering to continue as chair for another year, Garverick was elected by acclamation.

Walt McCullough of HP CSY reported some good news on the state of High Availability and the HP e3000. The HP e3000 is now SAN fabric-enabled with the SCSI-to-fibre A5814A-003 fabric router. Availability is scheduled for September 1. McCullough also mentioned there is a replacement for the performance-challenged AutoRAID 12H, the VA7100 family of disk arrays. The VA7100 are Fibre Channel arrays, so the SCSI-to-fibre router will have to be used. The management software for the VA7100 is supported. Garverick, having seen one of these arrays, added that the VA7100 has a very small form factor.

Job Diercks spoke next about his new book (www.diercks.net/mpe/), the first and only title written specifically about HP e3000 system management. [See our August 2001 issue for a review.] Diercks discussed how thrilled he was at the response to his book and how pleased he was to be able to give something back to the HP 3000 community. His goal was to write a book that was appropriate as an introduction to MPE/iX system management and also as a first reference for experienced system managers. He also answered several questions about the whole process of writing a technical book and the publication process.

Jon Backus was introduced and spoke for a few minutes about Tech Group University and its training mission, and also about the MPE Certification program (www.mpecert.org) he is spearheading.

Jeff Vance, CI Architect and one of CSY’s representatives on the MPE Forum, spoke next about the System Improvement Ballot (SIB) process. He related how the individual SIG ballot results were combined with CSY’s list of proposed enhancements to come up with a SIB of 33 items that were do-able, “do-able” being the operative word this year. The whole process was intentionally biased in favor of smaller-effort items. He went on to report on the status of some of the top vote-getting items:

• The number one vote-getter, “Investigate making IMAGE thread safe,” is complete.

• The Java Hotspot compiler which speeds up the execution of Java.is available for MPE/iX 7.0.

• The latest versions of Perl, PHP, OpenSSL and NTP are, or soon will be, available on the CSY Jazz Web server.

• Porting of the latest version of Sendmail is in progress and should be available soon.

• Mitigating the 4Gb limit on usable LDEV 1 disk space is in progress but no completion date is available.

• A version of Samba supporting encrypted passwords is planned.

• A shutdown command and the integrating of MPE and UPS monitoring has been investigated but not staffed yet.

• System CI variables have been investigated but no commitment has been given to complete the project.

Garverick took the floor again and thanked HP for the work done on the SIB items and also for:

• The “enhanced” PING, created by Lars Appel of the German RC, that removes the requirement that the user have NA and NM capability.

• The improved patch process utilizing store-to-disk file format, improved unpackp script and improved instructions that now include the option of using Patch/iX instead of AUTOPAT.

• The improved Patch/iX.

After discussing several items left over from last year, the meeting turned to new business and potential enhancement requests:

• OP capability. This capability is potentially dangerous and is being misused to solve problems it was never meant to solve. It has become a major security hole at many sites.

• Improve the security of BULDACCT jobs. [This may be a non-issue now, since at least one SIG member said the BULDACCT job files are now built with creator access.]

• Provide software control of tape compression options. Make DDS drivers aware of “;DEN=”. Also, enhance DEVCTRL to return current status. [A later thread on HP3000-L suggested this would be difficult.]

• Make site-specific and beta patches available via HP’s Web-based ITRC, as is done for HP-UX patches.

• Implement dev/console.

• Allow ACDs to be assigned to groups and accounts.

• Provide a means to limit the size of spoolfiles to prevent runaway jobs from stopping the spool queues.

• Allow OUT.HPSPOOL to reside on a user volume for performance reasons. It was noted that by eliminating the classname SPOOL from LDEV 1 you can at least prevent spool files from residing on LDEV 1.

• Create a way to interrupt autoboot — the 10-second timer is often too short.