Attendees of this year’s SIG3000 meetings, heavy with consultants and vendor technical staffers, learned that HP will be updating its Samba/iX file sharing tool and is considering whether to support PHP for the HP 3000.

Samba is being brought forward to the 2.03 version of the utility, which will provide more secure file transfer and sharing options. The current version of Samba shipping with HP e3000s is using code more than two years old. OnOn Hong of the 3000 division said “We are going to port this new version, but the release date has not been decided.” HP will begin making the source code for the 1.9.16p9 version of Samba available on its Jazz Web server.

More specific release dates for updates of Internet and interoperability software were part of HP’s communications at the conference, where the first day centered around MPE issues and connectivity software. DCE/RPC 2.1 is set for a Spring, 2000 release, and the DCE Security DCS client will be available “sometime this summer.” HP has no current plans to let Syslog/iX allow logging of system messages, but Hong said if customers needed the functionality, the division could consider working it into its development cycle.

HP also outlined the details of its steps to make porting software to the HP 3000 easier. The Porting Enablers activity in the division’s labs is designed to make ports of popular software in the Unix environment available more quickly on HP e3000s. “This project is designed to solve the Unix porting problems,” Hong said. HP is working in six major categories: the compiler/linker, core MPE issues, core networking issues largely surrounding sockets, core Posix issues, libc redundancies, and the shell.

HP also mentioned that it’s considering support for the Personal Home Page (PHP) software recently ported to the e3000 by engineer Mark Bixby. Earlier this month Bixby reported that he’d ported PHP to the 3000 on his own time. PHP can authenticate and track users in Web applications. “We are strongly considering this feature, and we need more investigation of it,” Hong said.