HP may have been unwilling to commit its own lab engineers to creating Domain Name Services (DNS) for MPE/iX, but it's helping outside programmers deliver the link to the Internet. HP 3000 customers must now attach a DNS server that's not an HP 3000 to get their systems onto the Internet or to operate intranets. The MPE/iX DNS will be another piece in the Internet puzzle to let 3000 sites run such networks without less reliable platforms.
Mark Bixby, a tech support manager at the Coast Community College District in Costa Mesa, Calif., is now using an HP 3000 loaned to him by HP's Commercial Systems Division to complete work on BIND, one of the missing links to getting an HP 3000 DNS up and running.
Once Bixby's work on BIND 8.1 and syslog started crashing the college's mission critical HP 3000, CSY shipped him a loaner system to continue his porting efforts. At presstime Bixby had released the first public version of BIND/iX, a version he labelled "use at your own risk. BIND is the most commonly used DNS server on the Internet. BIND makes your domain names visible to the Internet, as well as handling client requests to resolve domain names other than your own. Prior to BIND/iX, an HP 3000 shop had to rely on some other machine to host their organization DNS information. Now you can host it locally."
Bixby has also finished an MPE/iX port of syslog, the standard event logging subsystem for Unix. The freeware is available from his Web site. In addition to being vital to completing BIND/iX, Syslog/iX also logs to files, terminal devices and logged on users, and forwards to other syslog systems.
Hewlett-Packard made $784 million in profit during its second quarter ending April 30, but the results had HP's bull investors running like the ones in Pamplona. When expectations were set for healthier earnings than HP posted on $10.3 billion in revenues, the bears came out of the woods and sold HP's share price down 10 percent in a single day just after the report. HP bettered its 1996 marks in orders, profits and sales, but the increases didn't satisfy investors.
Most worrisome to investors was the slowdown in order growth. HP posted only a 3 percent increase in orders over the previous year's period, including a 2 percent decline in all of HP's US orders. International orders rode to the rescue. HP also reported that the high end of its Unix business showed weak order growth. Overall, orders in HP's computer business increased only 1 percent over last year's second quarter. The company said that its "efforts to reduce PC and printer inventories in the reseller channel adversely affected this quarter's growth."
In light of the order slowdown, HP CEO Lew Platt said the company's job "is to reinvigorate growth across the company while continuing to manage costs, expenses and assets extremely well." Platt pointed to HP's new initiative with the Extended Enterprise -- a new HP business unit run by former CSY GM Glenn Osaka -- as a way to recapture the high growth rate of 1995-96.
HP managed to shave a little off its cost-of-goods numbers for the first time in many a quarter. Platt acknowledged that HP was working harder on "a shift in our revenue mix to higher-gross-margin products." HP's managers have admitted that some businesses in the company generate a lot of revenue but little profit. Cost of operations continued to rise at HP, with a 24.1 percent figure posted for the latest quarter.
HP's efforts to provide a faster network pipe for HP 3000s are continuing, despite the long delay since CSY's announcement of support for the 100VG-AnyLAN technology. Not long after HP announced support for the 100 megabit per second topology, 100 Base-TX entered the networking scene, a competing technology. HP still intends to deliver both for HP 3000 servers. Alvina Nishimoto, Internet R&D manager for CSY, said customers can expect AnyLAN support with the Express 3 release of MPE/iX 5.5, which is scheduled for the third quarter of this year.