HP’s first Webcast designed to cover more than a major model introduction went off smoothly in mid-May, but it was several weeks later before any real news surfaced from the Internet event. HP was true to its word about answering questions submitted via the Web interface during the conference, detailing plenty of how-tos that went beyond its marketing message about the platform. Customers questioned HP’s plans for Internet keystone sendmail, an all-purpose mail transport with plenty of power and just as much complexity in configuration and setup. Customers also wanted to know about perl, a superior scripting language that’s available for the 3000 as freeware but currently not supported.

Perl is going to cost something to be supported, but sendmail will apparently be included in FOS as a supported product. HP said “Perl 5.6.0 is available today as unsupported freeware from www.bixby.org/mark/perlix.html. HP is currently working on porting 5.6.1 as unsupported freeware, and will submit the MPE changes from that code base forward into what will become Perl 5.7.x. Official HP support is currently planned for a future release of Perl, to be bundled with a future release of the extra-cost HP WebWise MPE/iX Secure Web Server product.” On sendmail’s future, HP said it “has begun porting sendmail to MPE as a supported part of FOS. To learn more about the features of sendmail, please see www.sendmail.org. An older unsupported version of sendmail is available from www.bixby.org/mark/sendmailix.html.