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Hidden Value details commands and procedures in MPE that can improve your productivity with HP 3000 systems. Send your tips to john@burke-consulting.com.

Edited by John Burke

I’m having trouble getting reliable information on which DLT drives are supported on an 969 system running MPE/iX 6.5 PP3. Do I need part numbers for DLT7000 or DLT8000 drives which are supported?

Denys Beauchemin replies:
Any FWD DLT7000 or 8000 will work on your system. I don’t think you can buy a new DLT7000, so it’s off to the broker for that one, or check out dirtcheapdrives.com. They have an external Quantum DLT8000 with HVD connection for about $2,200. An internal model is $200 less.

A disk drive failed on a user volume. How can I determine the accounts and groups on that user volume?

John Clogg replies:
Try REPORT @.@;ONVS=<volset>

Jeff Woods adds:
In addition to the suggestion to use “:REPORT @.@;ONVS=volset” (which may fail because it’s actually trying to look at the group entries on the volume set) you can do a “:LISTGROUP @.@” and scan the listing for groups where HOMEVS is your uservolumesetname. The advantage of LISTGROUP is that it uses only the directory entries on the system volume set. You may want to redirect the output of LISTGROUP to a file and then search that rather than trying to scan the listing directly.

Is there any startup script, similar to .profile in Unix, for the HP 3000? I need to set my prompt setting and many others in the startup script.

Joseph Rosenblatt replies:
Logon UDCs (User Defined Command) would be the way to ‘simulate’ the ‘.profile’ functionality. Setting the HPPROMPT variable, for example, can set the prompt.

I am trying to create a new database with two detail datasets and 5 automatic masters. DBSCHEMA is reporting the following error: ERROR MORE THAN ONE PRIMARY MASTER. What is my problem and how do I fix it?

Michael Berkowitz and Jerry Fochtman reply:
It means exactly what it says. You have more than one item defined as the primary chain in a detail data set. This is done by putting a “!” in from of the master dataset that links to a detail index.

What does the following error on a message file mean?
! ERROR NUMBER: 71 RESIDUE: 8224 (WORDS) !
! BLOCK NUMBER: 538976288 NUMREC: 8224 !

Per Ostberg and Jeff Woods reply:
“Too many files open.”

Stan Seiler adds:
I’ve seen this a lot with COBOL programs that open a file in utility code that then forgets to close the file. After calling it about 1000 times (more or less), you’ll start getting that error.

If you intend to have two TurboIMAGE passwords in your database, one for READ and another for READ/WRITE, do you need to set each password for each field in a dataset?

Tom Emerson replies:
No. You only need to set passwords at the field level if you want field-level restrictions (very tricky to maintain). Want you want to do is set the passwords for each DATASET.

If my HP 3000 does not fail mechanically for next 23 years, what obstacles will force us to stop using the machine?

Christian Lheureux and Wirt Atmar reply:
The issue is with the Calendar intrinsic, which has a 7-bit field to encode year. The reference year is 1900. On a 7-bit field, you can encode from 0 to 127. So the latest year you can encode with Calendar is 1900 + 127 = 2027. January 1, 2028 is going to be a problem. The internal calendar will overflow at midnight, December 31, 2027; thus you won’t get your full 23 years. Rather, you only have 22 years, six and a half months left.