Number 64 (Update of Volume 6, Issue 9)

Room to roam at HP World

With a little more than a month before the start of the HP World conference, it appears the travel and entertainment slashes in the computer industry may be having an effect on attendance. While here at the NewsWire we consider attending HP World a vital part of keeping up with the 3000's advances, some notable faces won't be in Chicago next month. For example, neither HP's 3000 Java guru Mike Yawn or SIG-Java chairman Gavin Scott have plans to attend, giving the one-hour SIG-Java meeting scheduled for Friday at noon a very open flavor. HP's made much of its cost reductions in travel during its slowdown this fiscal year, so Yawn might not be the only familiar HP face not present in the Windy City. Alan Heter, who's been pressing the language into production fitness at Alliant Food Services for the past two years, will chair the Java meeting, so there's bound to be ample in-the-trenches experience exchanged.

There might be less room at the inns for the conference. Sometime in June Interex pulled the Palmer House Hilton from its conference hotels list, leaving the Chicago Hilton and Towers and Hyatt Regency McCormick Place as the remaining conference hotels. It only matters to those attendees who need daily transport to the McCormick Center hall, a vast venue somewhat notorious for being nearby nothing. It will be a healthy walk from the Palmer House, to be sure. Interex is supplying free shuttle busses from the Hyatt and the other Hilton, but now not from the Palmer House. It's the first time in quite awhile we can recall having only two hotels to serve the show, and losing one so close to the conference's opener.

On the other hand, the show's lineup looks interesting because of a few new faces. HP's new king of technology, Chief Technology Officer Rich Demillo, will speak in the hour before CSY general manager Winston Prather gives the "State of the HP 3000" talk on Thursday afternoon. Interex materials promise that Demillo, who leads the HP Technology Council, will "articulate the company's technology direction, preview some recent product innovations, and reveal a well-kept secret about a revolution under way at HP." Any HP secrets revealed in this publicity-concious era certainly have our attention.

There's also a four-hour training session led by Jon Diercks on configuring and deploying Enhydra on an e3000, something Diercks has been intimate with in his duties at ORBiT Software. Just afterward Diercks will be signing copies of his new MPE/iX Administration book, the first to be published specific to the platform in many years.

Even an HP World with lighter attendance can provide plenty of instruction and illumination. Demos can run longer and deeper with casual Expo floor traffic, and talk with old friends and new resources can become more meaningful. In a world where much of our contact is through e-mail and virtual chats, the face-time of conferences jump-starts new relationships and sparks old ones. We recommend attending the show if you want to keep your HP 3000s up to date and protect their important status in your companies. Things get more expensive after July 28, so check out the options -- ranging from free Expo passes to the $1,590 Five Day Passport -- at the Interex HP World Web site.

Crypto toolkit gets ported for 3000

HP has posted a binary distribution of OpenSSL 0.9.6a at its Jazz Web site for the HP 3000, http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/hp_freeware/openssl. The software is available for now as unsupported HP freeware. It's the same way that essential Internet tools like Domain Name Services and Samba started their lifespans for the e3000 community.

OpenSSL is a general purpose cryptographic toolkit for building SSL security into e-commerce and Internet applications. It provides the SSL and TLS protocols, X.509 authentication, various cryptographic algorithms, a C language API library, and a command-line utility capable of file encryption/decryption, S/MIME composing and validation and more.

The cyrpto capabilities were one of the leading requests in this year's Systems Improvement Ballot. It was ranked ninth in the limited voting that took place this spring, as part of a request to make it, PHP and NTP as "freeware."

MPE didn't have an affordable SSL solution before the release of this freeware. The high cost of the RSA SSL-C toolkit — whose royalties run into the thousands of dollars — is out of reach for most customers. HP had already ported OpenSSL to MPE for its WebWise Secure Web Server, and it supports that port. This OpenSSL freeware will enable e3000 developers build SSL-based encryption capabilities into applications. SSL is the current defacto standard for secure peer-to-peer network applications. Without it, customers either have to use unencrypted data streams or implement their own unproven schemes.

HP notes that "some countries restrict the use of strong cryptography, so it is your responsibility to determine if your use of this OpenSSL distribution is legal in your own country or not."

Anybody who wants to test-drive OpenSSL, without installing it on their own HP 3000, can use the installation on HP CSY's Public Access Development System (aka Invent3k). You can register for logon access to invent3k at: http://jazz.external.hp.com/pads

Find MPE commands with WHERE

HP CSY engineer Jeff Vance, king of all that's Command Interpreter related on the 3000, has enhanced the WHERE script on the Jazz Web server to handles Posix directory names in HPPATH. The script now also follows symbolic links back to the real file. You can find the updated script at http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/where.txt

Vance explains that "WHERE is a simple command file that accepts a command name, which can be wildcarded, and reports which UDCs, scripts and program files match the name. This has been useful to me and some other engineers in CSY when we know the first few letters of some script, but can't remember the whole name; or when we want to know which "DIFF", for instance, we are using (since we have DIFF UDCs, the shell's diff, DIFF command files, etc.)"

Link Perl with IMAGE data

Ted Ashton has uploaded a new version of his MPE::IMAGE module for Perl users, software that makes it possible to call IMAGE databases from Perl on the HP 3000. The new 0.04 version is still "pretty much read-only," according to an introductory description by Ashton, but now DbClose assumes mode 1 if the mode is not specified, and it catches DbInfo failure in item_info. The software handles all of the documented DbInfo modes with the exception of the 800 (TPI) series). DbControl is also available, and DbBegin, DbEnd, DbMemo, DbXBegin, DbXEnd, and DbXUndo are tested and documented.

More and more programmers are discovering the capabilities of Perl on the HP 3000, and Ashton's modules make the language even more useful for operations which need to read data from IMAGE/SQL. The new module has a README file available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) at http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/Ted_Ashton under Ashton's MPE-IMAGE headings.

What to do with old disks on new 3000s

In many cases, sell them off. That's the summary advice from HICOMP's Denys Beauchemin when customers asked on the 3000-L mailing list. While the 9Gb drives from the 900 Series e3000s might be worth transferring, customers are going to take quite a bite out of performance by putting the older drives into brand new, PCI-enabled e3000s. Even though both generations of 3000 use SCSI, "the built in controller is of the LVD (Low Voltage Differential) Ultra2 SCSI variety," he said. "You can easily get additional HVD controllers that will allow you to plug in existing HVD drives. For the SE drives, you could plug them into a LVD controller, but what a waste."

"Consider this however; a measurable part of the increase in throughput for the N-class is due to the Ultra2 SCSI connection and the 10,000 RPM disk drive. I understand the cost factor and certainly can appreciate why you would want to re-use the 9Gb devices, especially the F/W Diff ones. I would consider discarding the 2Gb and 4Gb drives and any FAST SE devices."

3000's BIND updated at Bixby.org

HP engineer Mark Bixby has continued his personal caretaking for the BIND Domain Name Services software for the HP 3000, releasing an 8.2.4 version. It's available for download at his personal Web site, <http://www.bixby.org/mark/bindix.html>. Bixby's software includes "minor bug fixes and portability improvements. This release also includes fixes to the MPE-specific portion that are relevant if you are running the NAMED daemon and hosting slave zones. This bug was detected by using similar code in another port -- MPE BIND testing and real-life MPE BIND usage never uncovered this bug."

Bixby has also installed the latest release on the Invent3k server at CSY. Network administrators and HP 3000 managers can browse the standard HTML documentation for this release at: http://invent3k.external.hp.com/~MGR.BINDFW/

Samba's SWAT works better with freeware

With all the change in the air for Samba on the HP 3000 -- newer versions protect passwords better, and the latest version eliminates a security hole -- it seems the shareware, unsupported by HP versions still retain the edge over the CSY releases. That's especially the case for customers using SWAT, the Samba Web Administration Tool that eases configuration duties. Lars Appel of HP did the original port of the file and printer sharing product years ago, and he's noted that SWAT has more functionality in his version at www.sambaix.com than the official release from HP:

"The more recent Samba 2.0.7 versions for MPE/iX include SWAT for maintaining the smb.conf file. As SWAT is basically a standalone program that runs under INETD and reads/rewrites the smb.conf file, you might be able to install it from one of the 2.0.7 builds for MPE/iX. However, as far as I understand, SWAT comes with a bunch of related files (like the online man pages, GIF files for the web interface and an online copy of a Samba book from O'Reilly), so it might be slightly more than just copying a single file."

"Notice that the HP version of SWAT seems to only work with "demo" mode enabled (via -a command line option) -- whereas the www.sambaix.com version prompts and validates an MPE user ID and password. In the former case, you might want to use inetd.sec to limit SWAT access to just a few selected PCs."

"Oh, and when using SWAT to maintain the older version of smb.conf, you would always have to keep in mind that not all of the input fields produce config directives that have a meaning for the older Samba version."

"An alternative to SWAT might be the bbSAT GUI for maintaining smb.conf that has been donated by a German channel partner. It used to be available on Jazz or at www.sambaix.com. If you're not shy of German-language Web sites, you could even pick it up at the original www.bb-online.de web site (assuming it still is available there)."

"Once you have Samba up and running (with the sample config), you can -of course-- use a PC editor like PFE or Proton or similar to edit smb.conf by mapping \\your3000\mgr.samba to a PC drive. I typically use this as cut&paste from existing share definitions can be more convenient than filling in another GUI screen. Just make sure your PC editor can write Unix format (LF, not CR+LF)."

Appel also notes that "You should better try to stay away from non-bytestream files when it comes to Samba access. Especially FA, VA and VB files tend to not work properly unless the PC side only uses certain file system calls (basically read sequentially until eof is detected, instead of retrieving the file size and then reading that many bytes)."

"You can find some details regarding the Posix stat() / fstat() issue, which is essentially an issue of FLABELINFO and FFILEINFO, in a writeup called "Samba/iX and PC Connectivity Issues," in the Document Library at the http://www.sambaix.com Web site.

Correction: notes on Sieler's Q&A

In our June Q&A with master developer Stan Sieler, we made a few missteps. Sieler was glad to correct and clarify with his message as follows:

"My old HP computers aren't at the office in the moment. I like the HPs I have: the 85, 86, 87, 150, 120, and a Series III. I don't have a Series III ... I'd like to get one, however. On the other hand, I'm trying to avoid computers that I can't physically pick up :)"

We said that Sieler is responsible for HP's STORE, but he noted, "I wrote the new STORE that came with the Q-MIT of MPE/V, and is still available today as the "transport mode" STORE .... not the current NM STORE program."

We also said he had signed on in the past year as the co-chair of SIG-MPE. Sieler replies, "I hope not! I'm vice-chair, and have been for about three years. I worked hard to avoid being chair or co-chair! I'm quite happy with John Burke (and Jeff Kell before him) being the chairman of SIG-MPE!"

Regarding his comment that "As far as I can tell, the Language Labs stopped supporting the 3000,
and to a large extent stopped supporting anything but C," he adds, "I should clarify that Randy Roten's group in Roseville does support the MPE compilers, but their resources seem to be very limited, compared to the rest of the Language Lab. Randy and some of his people are always at IPROF, talking to the users. As for C, MPE's version is years behind the HP-UX version, unfortunately."