Welcome to our 20th edition of Online Extra, the e-mail update of articles in the August 1997 3000 NewsWire as well as items that have surfaced since we last mailed our First Class issue. This service is an exclusive to our paid subscribers. We'll e-mail you this file between the First Class issues you receive by mail, updating the stories you've read and adding articles that have developed between issues.
Editorial: How to Manage a Roundtable
We promised a report from the political trenches of the HP World management roundtable -- while attendees were learning more about MPE in the Supersessions that afternoon. The fact that sessions were scheduled opposite the roundtable confirmed our suspicions: the roundtable has stopped being an important information point of the HP World show.
We're commenting on the roundtable -- and reporting its news in the next issue -- to give you advice about using a tool that can genuinely help you get more from your 3000. That tool is Interex, the organizers of the HP World show as well as the HP computer user group. But Interex displays two distinct personalities this time of year. And it appears that this year the conference organizers got the better of the roundtable, while some users felt they got worse results.
The most formal meeting between 3000 customers and HP management at the Conference Formerly Known as Interex, the management roundtable has been a way of taking the pulse of the customer base and hearing where HP was willing to focus its resources. In years past it has been a place to air grievances between customer and vendor, as well as a listening point for HP's senior managers.
The most notable management roundtable, in the 13 straight Interex conferences I have covered, was the one that changed HP's 3000 management the most. In 1990 customers expressed mighty displeasure with HP's treatment of IMAGE and the 3000 in Boston, and the national computer trade press within easy earshot of the row. The unhappiness led to the Customer First strategy at the 3000 division, where direct contact between customers, labs and managers became part of everybody's job description. Customer First is such a good model that the Enterprise Systems Division (the HP 9000 group) is still working to implement it.
If the Boston roundtable was the most noteworthy meeting, the management roundtable at HP World Chicago last month could be called the least controversial. But this was not because the 1997 roundtable lacked controversial questions for HP 3000 customers. HP had outlined a brighter future for 3000 customers just two days earlier with announcements of application evangelism, 64-bit MPE/iX and a bundled Netscape Web Server for the 3000s. Still, issues remained that could be addressed by HP's top management. We knew that because of an advance in technology during 1997 delivered by Interex -- a World Wide Web listing of all presubmitted questions for the roundtable. Everyone could see what questions were being asked, even if they didn't get aired at the meeting in Chicago.
Unfortunately, this year Interex and HP decided to take a roundtable format and steer it into the new waters of relationship-building. Interex has conducted a useful customer satisfaction survey in recent years that serves as an overall gradecard of HP's offerings. This year's roundtable was dominated by an analysis of this survey, with Interex volunteer board president Jeff Odom asking HP managers what they were doing about HP marks in areas like software satisfaction.
The format didn't provide for any interaction between attendees and HP managers for almost half the time allotted. Dick Watts, who's recently been put in charge of a lot of the HP sales force, provided some answers to some of the issues. But the new format had the effect of locking users out of roundtable discussions for nearly an hour.
Attendees who didn't like the format change thought they'd been deceived about the intentions for the two-hour block of time. Sometimes that happens at a conference -- whether by design or accident, sessions don't always deliver what a user expects. For those of us who've seen lively discourse and ideas exchanged in prior roundtables, we found this roundtable without that spark that made it interesting in the past.
We're more concerned about another issue: many submitted questions for the roundtable regarding 3000 issues were not aired for HP management to comment upon. Interex has promised it will supply answers for questions not asked, and post them on its Web site. While that's a reasonable post-show response, it falls short of the tradition for the roundtable: interaction between HP and customers.
There were hard questions presubmitted to this year's Management Roundtable. They aren't going away, even if they weren't read to managers who could have answered them with grace and candor. It's a waste of more than a user's time to attend a roundtable where such questions are removed. It's a waste of HP managers' time. People like Dick Watts and Harry Sterling are plenty capable of covering the issues, even those that have been asked in other years or other venues. The way to manage a roundtable is to let the discussion follow questions submitted in advance, and use HP's superior management talent to address issues.
A customer satisfaction discussion is important, but it belongs in another meeting. (Indeed, two years ago the survey merited a press conference of its own, albeit without HP to comment on the results.) Interex the conference organizer instead used this year's roundtable time to show off its ability to influence HP with a survey. Interex the user group needed that time to get answers to its members' questions. This year users didn't get much of a roundtable. We hope that next year's HP World will include a roundtable without competing sessions -- and with ample time for all the questions.
Classic 3000s still work beyond the millennium
Even though we reported last month that HP will be pulling the plug on more than a quarter of its installed base HP 3000s next year, customers aren't so quick to do a shutdown on their MPE V systems. One of the most notable holdouts is Ken Nutsford of Computermetric Systems in New Zealand. Nutsford posted a notice that Series 70s appear to work just fine with dates beyond 1999. He then asked if HP could provide source code for the older version of MPE, since support wouldn't be available to keep those "Classic" HP 3000s running:
"The HP 3000 Model 70 running MPE/V Platform 3P or later release is Year 2000 compliant. We have been able to do Year 2000 testing on a Micro GX running MPE/V Release 3P since January 1994. We are still waiting to do Year 2000 testing on MPE/iX!"
"HP are wanting to bring closure on Classic HP 3000 systems in 1998 by having all these boxes replaced with PA-RISC boxes. This is not the only closure option for HP. There are other alternative sources of equipment maintenance besides HP. The main issue in keeping these systems operational is software support which HP is ending in September 1998. If HP provided the source for MPE/V and all sub-systems on DDS, then MIS departments could provide in-house software support or out-source the software support function to others."
"Unfortunately there is no SIGMPEV to give MPE/V users a voice and provide advocacy on these issues to HP, even if there was any interest among INTEREX members."
There are other issues to consider if you want to keep a Series 70 or other MPE V system running beyond next year, according to some users. Ken Kirby of Vanderbilt University posted this reply to Nutsford's advice about Series 70 readiness:
"Another good reason not to stay with the Series 70 is the difficulty of getting parts. The last time our 70 was down, it lay lifeless for three days waiting for HP to locate a part and have it sent here. Fortunately, there are no critical applications on our 70, as we have migrated most to a 987. The Series 70 was a fine piece of equipment in its day. So was the Titanic. For those of us still aboard, it looks like the iceberg is just around the bend."
Kirby, like HP, pointed out "I think you will be pleasantly surprised when you see how much cheaper the maintenance is on an MPE/ix box than it was on your Series 70."
PatchWatch: OpenMarket Web Server fixes
While we reported that HP had discontinued sales of the Open Market Web server products on July 1, those solutions are still in place at some notable sites. (For one, the NewsWire's Web site is running on the Open Market solution!) We've heard reports that large HTML pages sent to users from the Open Market Web server can arrive incomplete; they can be missing some bytes and are, ahem, less than unusable in that state.
Jim Hofmeister of HP's Network Expert Center posted a note that may help in this situation:
"If you are using the Open Market Web server, you will want to contact your friends at the HP Response Center and request a fix for SR 5003-344762 -- currently patch OMWEDL5 for 5.0 and 5.5."
The problem also seems to appear when sending large, CGI-generated pages to clients. Hofmeister added that CGI problem was only seen with the Open Market Web server and the fix was made in the Open Market Web Server code. The patch wasn't available as part of any PowerPatch as of presstime, so you need to ask for it by name.
Get a customized SLT from HP
Randy Smith, an enterprising Response Center Account Advocate (what a great job title) let users know that HP will build an SLT for you that includes the patches you need -- and it might save you some time at very little expense:
"For those who are interested, HP offers fairly inexpensive consulting to create a customized SLT tape for your system, for OS upgrades, PowerPatch installs, and regular patching. It can cut system downtime for those operations by about half or so, significant to some. Please note that if you already have a PSS, PAS, CSS, or BCS level of support, you might be able to get this as a deliverable."
PatchWatch: Deciphering the patch codes
Smith (above) also took a crack at explaining the patch naming process to help you keep track of whether a patch is the right one for you:
"When we release a PowerPatch, we title it PPCoovv, where oo is the OS 5.0 or 5.5, and vv is the two-character version of the PowerPatch. In the case [of the most recent PowerPatch] it would look like PPC5502."
Here's a quick run-down of how to identify what a patch means:
Characters 1-3 are the product or subsystem ( MPE=MPE TIX=TurboImage DIC=Dictionary ) Characters 4-7 are part of the serialized id and won't mean much to you. Characters 4-5 usually take the shape of GX, HX, JX serially. Characters 6-7 are really serial (can go from 00 - Z9). If there is a letter on the end, that is the actual version of the patch.
So -- MPEJX54B is an MPE core OS or driver patch, and is version B of that patch.
Three last things... 1) Any PowerPatch will probably contain patches that fix a number of different subsystems, so you'll find all kind of patches, besides just MPE (TIX, DIC, NSS, DTC). 2) Any PowerPatch (not Express Release) is only a snapshot in time of the patches that HP has available for that OS that will co-exist together. 3) The patches and/or functionality is cumulative from one PowerPatch to the next on the same OS. So PowerPatch 2 contains new fixes since PowerPatch 1, plus the fixes that were on PowerPatch 1.
To sum it up, you'll find three kinds of patches on a PowerPatch: A) Patches that are new since the last PP. B) Patches that are the supersedes of patches in the last PP (different patch IDs) C) Patches that are still valid and have been carried over since the last PP."
Backup with DLT, but remember the bandwidth
If you're lucky enough to have a DLT tape backup system in your environment, you'll want to be sure to keep it connected directly to the system to be backed up for greatest throughput. A lot of network connections will only support up to 3.6 Gb per hour throughput, and the DLT 4700 systems can get up to 20Gb of data off your 3000 disks in an hour through a direct connection. Paul Meszaros of Orbit Software, which makes a software solution that links DLT systems directly to HP 3000s, notes:
"As we have seen our users exceed throughput of 20Gb/hour, why throw away that performance by backing up over a network that will only support max 3.6Gb? The full capacity of a DLT 4700 is approximately 550Gb -- backing that up over a network would require over 150 hours of network-swamping, even if you could sustain it!" Meszaros adds that even backing up to a directly-connected DDS-3 DAT drive "will probably exceed the throughput you will realize over a network backup." The bandwidth issues might subside somewhat once HP ships out the 100-Mbit network solutions for MPE/iX later this quarter.
Web server survey shows how 3000s are online
Since HP unveiled a solution for the canceled OpenMarket Web solution, the SIGWeb special interest group meeting there instead focused on discussions about that new Netscape software and the results of SIGWeb's first Web-Based survey for demographics of (mostly) MPE users. Joe Geiser, co-chairman of the SIG, shared the first round of demographics below at the meeting:
Total Responses: 31
Systems Used (Many multiplatform installations)
HP 3000 - 29
HP 9000 - 13
HP 9000 Workstation - 7
NT - 25
NetWare - 15
Other Unix - 11
Web Servers Deployed:
Now - 23
1-6 Months - 4
7-12 Months - 3
Web Server Hardware Platform(s):
3000 - 17
9000 - 10
9000 workstation - 1
NT - 23
NetWare - 1
Other Unix - 6
Server Software Used:
Apache: 17
Netscape/Fast Track: 1
Netscape/Commerce: 1
Netscape/Other: 3
OpenMarket: 4
NCSA: 8
QWEBS: 3
Microsoft's Internet Information Server: 11
HP 3000 (Other): 4
NT (Other): 11
Network Infrastructure:
Internet: 28
Intranet: 24
Extranet: 4
HP 3000 division general manager Harry Sterling stated in his HP World speech that customers using the Web with HP 3000s fall into one of three categories: experimenters willing to put freeware solutions on their HP 3000s (Apache, for example); those dedicated to getting a commercial Web server working alongside their HP 3000s (and therefore using solutions on NT and 9000 systems); and those who need a commercial solution running under MPE/iX. We think that SIGWeb's survey shows a pretty even split between the three groups.
Hidden Value: Keeping larger files in QUAD
We reported in August that two suppliers were getting ready to release GUI-based editors for the HP 3000, but in the meantime more than a few of you are sticking with screen based editors like QUAD, the venerable shareware editor that's been a part of many swap tapes and CSL shipments from Interex. Here's a tip we spotted about making QUAD keep up with today's larger program listings:
"Whenever I have a file in QUAD and the line numbers get to be about 30000 or more and I try to Keep the file, I get a 'Get Work Key' error. I usually work around it but I would like to know if there is a setting somewhere that will allow me to Keep larger files in QUAD."
Paul H. Christidis replied:
"I've been using QUAD for many years now and have been able to edit files containing more that 3 million records. Your problem is caused by the size of QUAD's work file, which is built as ..;REC=768,,f,binary;disc=2047.., The error you are describing occurs when the mods 'use up' the entire work file. The last time I poked around QUAD's code, some years ago, the 2048 limit was 'hard coded' and I could not find any way of altering it. The more recent versions of QUAD, specifically the Native Mode versions, have been enhanced to check the value of the JCW 'QUADFILESIZE' and use its setting to build the work file. You may want to 'play' with that JCW for your site.
A vote for your own on the Interex board
We're lucky enough to find two candidates running for the Interex board of directors who are current NewsWire subscribers. Both Chad Gilles and Linda Roatch consider the HP 3000 to be important enough to their careers that they need the 3000 NewsWire arriving each month in their offices. We don't vote here at the NewsWire, but for those of you who have an Interex ballot to mark within the next few weeks, voting for Chad and Linda would put two more people with 3000-sense at the head of the only HP user group in North America.