They just keep going and going, those MPE engineers working at HP, despite the vendor’s intentions to stop selling the HP 3000 in a little more than eight months. Early in February HP posted notice that it’s enhancing the system’s TCP/IP transport, this time to “prevent IP precedence changes causing resets.” HP’s James Hofmeister told the 3000 community which reads the 3000-L mailing list that the enhancement supports the work-in-progress proposed RFC 2873, which recommends ignoring IP precedence changes in the TCP/IP of the end host systems. This change supports the Cisco routers’ modification of the IP precedence fields once a connection is established for what is known by Cisco as a ‘QoS environment.’ “

HP’s engineering on a machine that it’s walking away from comes in the form of a site-specific patch for 7.0, Hofmeister said, “as this is the only OS we have customers committed to testing. We will build a 7.5 patch with this enhancement after successful testing on 7.0, or possibly earlier if we have other customers request to test this enhancement.” We won’t comment much on the dual personality of HP toward its oldest business computing platform — except to say there’s still some people inside the vendor’s labs who care about the quality of your experience with this product. If you are interested in testing this enhancement, contact the HP Response Center and request enhancement SR 8606286850 for RFC 2873.