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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, or fax them to 512.331.3807.

Edited by John Burke

Our HP 3000 is connected to the Internet and I am trying to establish a VT connection with Reflection from home. I put in our IP address but get the following VT error: 39 REMOTE NOT ACCEPTING SERVICE REQUESTS. What am I doing wrong?

Doug Werth replies:
This error means the HP 3000 is seeing the packets coming in but doesn’t know how to route back. Your firewall (or router if you do have not firewall) is configured correctly to forward the packets to the HP 3000. But, now you need to configure the firewall/router as the HP’s default gateway in NMMGR.

I am trying to parse the output of showproc job=@ looking for a CPU problem. I am doing a STR on a line from
showproc as in
SETVAR SUBS,STR(‘!ID_REC’,1,1)
This fails if there is a single quote ‘ in the variable ID_REC, as in
run fred;info=’ data ‘
How can I work around this?

Jeff Woods and Jeff Vance reply:
If ID_REC is a CI variable (as opposed to a parameter/argument) try SETVAR SUBS,STR(ID_REC,1,1)
Any time you explicitly reference a CI variable (!var) its type is lost to the CI and it must be quoted to remain a string. The best solution is to not explicitly reference the variable, instead just use its name and no exclamation mark. This works for all CI commands that accept expressions (CALC, IF, ELSEIF, SETVAR, WHILE) and inside ![expr].

My 957 has been humming along for quite some time now on MPE/iX 6.0 with little or no help from me. We dropped hardware and software maintenance on the system some while back as we continue to expect this system to be phased out soon and bucks are tight here. Unfortunately, we’ve been running into some problems with our old 7980XC tape drives. I think it’s time to get rid of them (the last HP-IB stuff we’ve got). We’ve got some DLT4000 tape drives lying around and I’d like to connect one or two to the 957 and use them for database, incremental, and full backups. Can I simply hook a DLT4000 drive to the SE-SCSI port on the MFIO card, set its SCSI address, and add the device as an HPC1521B?

Gilles Schipper replies:
It should be no problem at all. The DLT4000 SE SCSI device can also be utilized as a boot device on the 957. You should use the device ID of DLT4000 and not HPC1521B. One issue that you should consider though is the patch level of your OS. If your 6.0 system is not patched, there may be an issue with very long restore times for specified filesets. However, if you have 6.0 PowerPatch 1 or 2 installed, that should not be a problem.

Otherwise, you should consider using the device ID of HPC1521B as a workaround to the restore problem. In any case, it would be best to use device ID DLT4000 and test to ensure good restore performance and only resort to device ID HPC1521B if the restore speed is NOT satisfactory.

We currently use REPORT to track CPU usage for individual GROUPS. I have been asked if it’s possible to track CPU usage for individual USERS. I know I can do it if I have them log into unique GROUPS, but that’s not an option. I don’t need to look in the past; this is for future usage.

Lars Appel and Gavin Scott reply:
If you have system logging for event 102 (Job Initiation) and 103 (job termination) turned on, it should be possible to extract the CPU information. The Job Initiation log identifies who people are and the Job Termination log includes CPU usage rounded to seconds. Of course you then need a program to scan the log files and accumulate this information, dealing with issues like logons that happen in one log file but the log off may be in a subsequent log file, etc. There are (were) commercial (and possibly contributed) tools to do this sort of thing.

[Editor’s note: remember when these charge back systems were a big thing? I remember writing one 20 years ago.]

Having found that FSPACE(fn ,-1) does a logical (key sequence) backup in CM KSAM, do the links work the same way in NM KSAM?

Bill Cadier replies:
There technically are no links, it’s a tree and when you go forwards or backwards the tree is searched. The key used is the one that last positioned the pointer. One small difference between CM and NM KSAM is that CM KSAM preserves the path table that was used to position the key where it is. So if someone deletes a record out from under a process then CM KSAM knows how it came to be pointing where it is and can logically reposition. NM KSAM cannot save its path table across calls, and so in that scenario you get an FSERR 170.

How can I find out what is installed on my system?

Andreas Schmidt replies:
HPSWINFO.PUB.SYS shows the OS Level, patch level, and HP patches applied as long as standard patch routines have been used. No third party software is listed in HPSWINFO, however.

[Editor’s Note: Robert Mills added that for third party tools you could try the ‘System Inventory Utility (SIU)’ written by Jeff Vance. It’s available as a free download from Jazz (jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/siu/index.html) For HP software, xeq psirpt.pred.sys gives a complete listing of products/bundles.

I am trying to ftp a ZIP file in the posix environment to AIX using an FTP get. I can successfully navigate to the correct group and see the file from AIX within FTP. When I try to do the get it fails with a NONEXISTENT GROUP (FSERR 51) error. The file name is of format filename.zip.

James Hofmeister replies:
When specifying the file on the 3000, you trigger the “posix file name” mode by specifying “./” (example: ./ntp.tar.Z) or by fully qualifying the file name in posix name space (example: /tmp/ntp.tar.Z). So, if you are attempting a GET on the AIX connected to the HP 3000 you’d say:

cd /tmp
get ./ntp.tar.Z
~or~
get /tmp/ntp.tar.Z

Lars Appel adds:
With more recent versions of the MPE/iX FTP server, I believe, you can also switch it to “Posix style mode” with SITE POSIX ON. This might even be configured as default in the SETPARMS.ARPA.SYS file. See FTPDOC.ARPA.SYS for details.

I am trying to set up a script that opens FTP and does an open, user, and password command then gives control over to the user. How can you send commands to FTP through CI script? As soon as it gets to the FTP prompt commands are not being sent.

Paul Christidis replies:
The FTP client on the 3000 supports ‘netrc’. In other words, if a file named ‘netrc’ exists in the user’s group (or a file equation pointing to the actual file) then FTP will login to the indicated host using the user name and password listed in the ‘netrc’ file. If you have access to a Unix system then issue the command “man netrc” for additional information.

Friedrich Harasleben adds:
Use the CI ECHO command redirecting IO to a file to create a CI command file with everything you want; then feed this file to FTP as input.

However I seem to format my ‘CD’ command, it won’t recognize directories with spaces in them. Is there a solution to this?

Jeff Kell replies:
You might try QUOT CWD Number 1. QUOT supposedly passes the argument directly to the server’s parser.