March
2005
Number 108
(Update of Volume 9, Issue 5)
OpenMPE gains two new
directors
New voices will join the OpenMPE board of directors this
month, after a three-week-long election added Chuck Ciesinski and
gave Mathew Perdue a chance to serve the future of MPE/iX. All
winners will serve two-year terms.
Ciesinski, a two-time candidate for the Interex user
group board of directors, led the field of first-time OpenMPE
candidates in the voting. The group's incumbent directors who were
running for another term -- Paul Edwards, Birket Foster and Alan
Tibbetts -- all won new terms.
Foster, the group's chairman, will begin his second
full two-year term. No other founding director of OpenMPE - the group
started operations in 2002, and Foster has served since the first
meeting - has returned for another term of volunteer service. Edwards
and Tibbetts each ran for full terms this year, after stepping in
during 2004 to fill resigned board posts.
A 2005 board resignation, from former treasurer Ron
Horner, left the group with another director's slot to fill by
appointment. Perdue, who operates an HP 3000 support and consulting
business and launched a new ISP management app for MPE, won the
appointment to the board.
OpenMPE directors serve as unpaid volunteers and
serve as an advocacy group and sounding board to HP's virtual HP 3000
managers. The OpenMPE-HP talks take place under an informal
Confidential Disclosure Agreement to encourage HP to discuss its
plans candidly. At some time after June 30 this year, HP intends to
announce its plans about licensing MPE/iX for development outside of
HP's labs. Last year OpenMPE mounted a campaign to raise funds for a
"virtual lab" to take over the HP work, but failed to gain
financial commitments from 100 HP 3000 customers.
Directors for the group are now Donna Garverick, John
Wolff, Stephen Suraci, and John Burke, along with Edwards, Foster,
Ciesinski, Tibbetts and Perdue. The election of the board was limited
to OpenMPE's members, who can join for free. More than 125 were
eligible to vote. This year's election drew twice as many candidates
as board openings. The 3000 NewsWire's Ron Seybold served as
independent election overseer.
HP wants input on CI
enhancements
Time is short to tell HP about how well it has designed
spooler information improvements to the HP 3000's Command
Interpreter. The new volinfo and spoolinfo functions for the CI have
been among the fastest improvements to emerge from HP's development
labs. Jeff Vance, the HP engineer who's been the guru of the CI for
many years, notified customers through the HP 3000 newsgroup and
mailing list about the chance to comment on CI enhancements.
The customer and developer comments will need to
arrive in March to have any impact at HP, Vance said. "At some
point, probably in a month or so, the specs will need to be
frozen," he said. Customers can post their comments to the 3000
newsgroup, or e-mail Vance directly at jeff.vance@hp.com. Vance posted a
message that shows what spoolinfo's HELP text might look like.
Customers with a greater interest can get a spreadsheet from Vance
which has a bit more detail and maps the spoolinfo items to their
corresponding AIFSPFGET items.
Full text of the help text messages with proper
formatting is available from HP's Jazz Web server:
For volinfo: http://jazz.external.hp.com/private/volinfoHelp.txt
For spoolinfo: http://jazz.external.hp.com/private/spoolinfoHelp.txt
These CI improvements ranked as numbers 11 and 15 in
the 2004 balloting for HP 3000 system improvements. Network printing
upgrades were the top vote getter in the 2004 survey of 3000
customers. HP had not scheduled a 2005 SIB vote as we broadcast this
issue of the Extra.
IBM shows HP an example of
IP sharing
HP's latest SIB responses for the 3000 -- the list of
items it agreed to work on for customers -- includes source trees and
build scripts for open source parts of MPE/iX like Samba. But HP's
intellectual property inside MPE/iX remains in limbo until the
company decides on future licenses. In the meantime, IBM is showing
the way on unlocking intellectual property. The company has released
more than 500 patents in a commons, a means to permit open source
developers to use IBM's patents in open source software.
"We will increasingly use patents to encourage
and protect global innovation and interoperability through open
standards, and we urge others to do so as well," said Dr. John
E. Kelly, IBM's senior VP of Technology and Intellectual Property.
IBM "pledged" patented technologies to open
source that cover a wide range of technologies, from databases to
networking, software development and interfacing. This patented
technology can be used for open source software, which IBM defined as
"any computer software program whose source code is published
and available for inspection and use by anyone, and is made available
under a license agreement that permits recipients to copy, modify and
distribute the program's source code without payment of fees or
royalties." For a full list of the IBM patents it placed in a
commons, see IBM's
PDF file.
HP has leaned toward negotiating royalties rather
than filing lawsuits over patents during the past year. The HP 3000's
operating system code will likely need an exception that leans even
further toward a commons approach -- or it may fall outside the
budgets of a 3000 development community scrapping for resources this
year.
Fiorina gets cut from World
Bank prospects
After losing her HP job last month, former CEO Carly
Fiorina got some consideration for the top job at the World Bank, but
lost out on a nomination for the job. The bank's prospective
candidate list grew as wide as rock singer Bono, who has a history of
fundraising for underdeveloped nations. President George Bush
nominated US Defense Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for the job over
Fiorina. Rumors about Fiorina's future in politics preceded her
dismissal last month as HP's CEO and chairman.
HP's current chairman, Patricia Dunn, told HP
shareholders at the company's annual meeting last week the search for
a replacement CEO "is well under way, that we're pleased with
our progress and that we are where we expected and wanted to be at
this juncture," according to an Associated Press report.
Analysts have been predicting a lengthy search for an executive who
must lead a $90 billion company with a game plan drafted by a
predecessor.
Interex, HP head into expo
competition
As Interex was scheduled to roll out the session details
this week for this summer's HP World conference and expo, the user
group could see its largest sponsor of the show ramp up booth sales
for the HP Technology Forum. HP's conference will debut one month
after HP World, including an expo hall where a few HP 3000-related
sponsors have already booked space.
Interex officials continue to report that HP is
supporting HP World with speakers and sponsorship money, although the
latter resource has been pared back from prior years. Association
conference and expo producer SmithBucklin is handling the expo for
the new HP show, including an interactive show floor map on the Web
to help vendors choose booth space. Interex has had its own
interactive Web-based show floor map for several years.
The Compaq and Digital-based Encompass user group is
taking the lead in session planning for the HP conference. Speaker
proposals for the HP Forum were due March 21. A Frequently-Asked
Questions file on the new HP conference is at www.hptechnologyforum.com/faqs.jsp.
(You can find the exhibitor map on the left-hand navigation panel; it
loads a Java app.)
The latest data on the HP World conference, including
a keynote by HP executive VP Ann Livermore -- who some say is a
candidate for HP's next CEO -- can be found on the Interex Web site.
Making note of TRACERT's
delays
HP 3000 users have their own version of the helpful
networking trace tool TRACERT, software which is a staple on any open
system. But using TRACERT on an MPE/iX system will deliver trace
information more slowly than a TRACERT from, say, Windows servers.
The reason is that HP coded TRACERT according to the standard for the
3000, according to HP support engineer James Hofmeister.
The issue came up when a customer tried to use
TRACERT's response time as a way to benchmark performance through
their HP 3000's firewall. Bad idea, said Hofmeister:
"The TRACERT on the 3000 is slow," he said
in an Internet message. "The implementation is more 'standard'
than is typically used with the TRACERT implementations on
PCs."
"Do not use the performance of TRACERT as an
indicator of performance through your firewall. Ping would be a more
accurate measure."
Hofmeister offered more details on what makes those
3000 traces look slower:
http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE?A2=ind0211C&L=hp3000-l&P=R3532
Another IMAGE bug can
cause corruption
While HP continues to work on a fix for a LargeFile
dataset bug in TurboIMAGE - a story we have on our March issue's
front page -- there's been another corruption bug waiting for HP 3000
customers running under MPE/iX 6.0. Adager has developed a workaround
for this bug, and CEO Rene Woc reports that a couple of customers a
week run into the problem:
"There's a known data corruption problem on 6.0
when ALTERCHKPTSTAT is not enabled on all your disc volume sets. This
data corruption will cause broken chains, as well as data loss, on
your IMAGE databases.
"In the MPE/iX 6.0 Communicator on page 216
there is an article on Transaction Manager. On page 219 within the
article there is a section entitled Checkpoint Improvement which
describes 2 new commands in Volutil for showing and setting this new
feature.
By default this option is DISABLED when you install
6.0.
The two commands are:
showchkptstat <volset-name>
alterchkptstat <volset-name> ENABLE|DISABLE
You should make sure ALTERCHKPTSTAT is ENABLED on all
your disc volume sets (system volume as well as any user volumes).
A key paragraph on page 220 then states:
"Since this solution remembers the dirty page
ranges in a data structure associated with each open file, it can't
affect files that were open before giving this request (ENABLE).
However, it will come into effect for the files that were open (for
the first time) after giving the request. So the best way to enable
or disable the Checkpoint Improvement is to reboot the machine after
giving the command. The following URL has a write-up on this
topic:
http://docs.hp.com/en/30216-90269/ch10s08.html#d0e15973
"The check point improvement code operates by
keeping a bit map of the portions of a file that changed so only
those portions need to be posted by transaction management. (that's
the very simple explanation :)
"This option doesn't exist in 6.5. The bit map
method does not scale well with > 4GB files, so it was
removed."
