Large Disk and LargeFiles are getting tested this month

The HP 3000 community is in the middle of testing HP’s latest enhancements and repairs to the server’s MPE/iX operating environment and its databases this month. HP made the Large Disk enhancement available in late July for beta test; customers with a current support contract with HP can download the patches. HP’s got a Communicator-style article on the enhancement at jazz.external.hp.com/papers/Communicator/7.5/LargeDisk.txt. Donna Garverick, OpenMPE board member working at Long’s Drug, reported that she installed patches MPEMXT1B, MPEMXT2B, MPEMXT3B, MPEMXT4B and MPEMXT7B on one of her systems, all related to supporting Large Disk: Any disk drive devices with more than 300GB of total capacity, MPE/iX’s old limit.

Garverick noted in a message to the 3000 newsgroup that “the '7' patch in particular changes the output of [HP utility] DISCFREE. If anyone has scripts that evaluate DISCFREE output, you'll need to update your scripts following the application of this patch. In particular, if you're using Beechglen's 'volfree' script and want an updated version of this script that can accomodate any version of DISCFREE, let me know and I'll send it to you.” Contact her at dgarverick@longs.com for your update.

Meanwhile, the repairs to a year-old flaw in the LargeFiles Datasets (LFDS) are in alpha testing the labs of one of the community’s most dedicated IMAGE utility vendors. Testing on the HP’s fix to LFDS will by nature proceed slowly, since the tests must be performed on some of the biggest HP 3000 databases anywhere. Tests that take more than three days to complete are not unusual. HP wants to put its fixes through this alpha-level of testing before rolling out the LFDS patches to the supported customer base in beta tests.