Number 84 (Update of Volume 8, Issue 5)

Homesteading hits it off this spring's tee

All around the HP 3000 world we hear logical arguments for migration away from the platform. But this month one of the platform's leading consultants brought in news of people staying with the platform, at least for the foreseeable future.

Paul Edwards took a trip to snowy Cleveland, Ohio earlier this month, and reported that about 35 customers at the meeting of the Northeast Ohio Regional Users Group were in no hurry to hop off the system. Edwards did his traveling to talk up homesteading tactics, but the chairman of the MPE Forum has also been stockpiling advice about migration away from the system. He said he didn't hear much from the NEORUG attendees this spring about leaving the 3000.

"Almost everybody seems to be homesteading," Edwards said on his return to Texas. "It was pretty much unanimous that people were going to stay on the platform for some period of time."

Just four months earlier NEORUG hosted a meeting built around HP's Transition Tour presentations, and president Gene Calai and others on the RUG board saw a lot of support for migration among their members. It might be that having a migration agenda at one meeting drew out those leaving, and featuring a homesteading talk attracted those who want to stay on. Edwards' report on the RUG members' desires is just another point of data that shows the 3000 community is mixed and still researching its options for the years to come. Attendees held him beyond his allotted time in Cleveland with questions, a healthy interest in an alternative that's just now starting to get its share of airtime.

Our hats are off to NEORUG, whose board is broad minded enough to host both sides of the Transition question. We see a similar balance emerging in other meetings of this spring. Migration or replacement is going to be a choice for a good share of the 3000 community, but homesteading has its advantages for others. It's especially easy to make a case for less change in a stalled economy -- something that might be thawing out, according to Edwards.

MBS signs MPE Forum chairman to support team

We’ll be writing about this development in some more detail in our April issue, but just as the Online Extra was ready for your in-box, MBS announced it’s signed a deal to add Paul Edwards and Associates to its homesteading support team.

Edwards and Associates, the consulting firm operated by MPE Forum chairman Paul Edwards, will bring MPE/iX operating system expertise to the offerings from MBS. A few weeks earlier MBS announced its new homesteading support practice with a deal that uses Terix as its hardware support arm.

Interex slashes Symposium entrance fee

If you've waited until the last minute to sign up for the East Coast Interex Solutions Symposium, your procrastination has saved you some money. Late last week Interex announced that it's put up a last-minute, $300 discount off the show's $695 price. At under $400, the four days of training is now cheaper than some cross-country airfares to Philadelphia, a price arrangement we find pretty rare these days. It's tough to find training on the Web that costs under $400, let alone face-to-face instruction with labs.

Sign up to get the update on the 3000's transition options at the Interex Web site. Register using the special priority code SS03D1 to get your discount.

Latest Mac support emerges from Minisoft

Minisoft has followed through on its plans to support the newest Mac operating system, providing OS X support for its Minisoft 92 terminal emulator. Minisoft said the release makes Minisoft 92 for MAC "the only native OS X HP terminal emulation package."

The software lets users connect Mac workstations to their hosts by direct cable, modem, or local area network. Users can log host data to printers or disk files and automate any task using the TermTalk scripting language.

MS92 for Mac takes full advantage of the advanced capabilities of the Macintosh interface including multitasking, online help, and cut and paste with the clipboard.

By "Carbonizing" MS92, Minisoft offers its connectivity software in the latest Mac operating environment. Version 5.0 supports complete HP 700/92 and VT102 terminal emulation, ASCII/binary file transfer, integrated NS/VT and Telnet networking support, local slaved printing, scripting and TrueType scalable fonts. To get a free demo copy, call Minisoft at 800.682.0200 or send an e-mail request to info@minisoft.com.

OpenMPE elections kick off

The OpenMPE organization is holding its elections for four board members in the week of March 24-26, after all the incumbent directors agreed to stand for re-election. No new candidates for the board emerged from the nomination process held through the first half of March, but the experienced directors are volunteering for another term of service. HP 3000 customers and users who are already members of OpenMPE can cast ballots at the organization's Web site. The board members will be announced at next week's Solutions Symposium meeting in Valley Forge, Pa. on March 28.

CAMUS meetings provide ERP advice

The HP 3000 ERP resource at Computer Applications for Manufacturing Users Society (CAMUS) is releasing more details about its May conference in the Dallas, Texas area. Sponsors who have already signed up for the May 4-7 affair include 3000 NewsWire sponsors Quantum Software and M.B. Foster, along with the Support Group, Protégé Software Services, Systems Consulting, Aware Consulting, John Galt Solutions, Summit Systems, Associates Ltd. Mobyz, ,eNVy Systems and TAG Business Computing Ltd. MANMAN owner SSA Global Technologies is also on the show floor, and the SSA GT CEO Mike Greenough is scheduled to be keynote speaker on the opening night of the conference. April 2 is the deadline to get into the Addison, Texas Hotel Intercontinental at the CAMUS rate of $119 a night. Make hotel reservations at 972.386.6000 and mention the CAMUS rate. Register for the conference at www.camus.org

Later on this week the Texas-area CAMUS regional user group is holding a one-day meeting, and the NewsWire will be providing part of the program. On March 20 I will kick off the South Central RUG meeting at 9:15 with a talk I'm calling "It's Only a Disaster If You Say So," our update about options for the future of any HP 3000s hosting MANMAN. The day-long meeting also includes talks from BlueLine Computing Services' Bill Towe, a review of the disaster recovery plan from David Harper of Thermon Communications, and "Managing Your MANMAN Data" by Sue Kiezel, president of ENTSGO. The meeting is at the Thermon offices in San Marcos, Texas at 100 Thermon Drive. Walk in registrations for the day's meetings around Disaster Recovery are welcome; lunch is included in the $30 entry fee. CAMUS members can attend for free.

Using FTP to save money on HP 3000s

HP 3000 owners are famous for finding cost-effective ways to compute, and few customers are better known for system efficiency than the founder of AICS Research and HP 3000 advocate Wirt Atmar. Just a few days ago we found an article by Atmar about doing a low-cost networked FTP backup of HP 3000s, aided by Windows systems. It's typical of the alternative thinking that Atmar promotes about our favorite business system. Atmar, who runs an software vendor providing a bang-up reporting application called QueryCalc, makes a case for using HP 3000s for many years to come.

Up on the HP 3000 newsgroup and mailing list, users were complaining that a lack of gigabit network connectivity makes it hard to implement a networked backup solution. The 3000 can exercise its File Transfer Protocol powers, and work alongside PCs, to make FTPing changed files –- a baseline level of backup -- inexpensive and fast. In an Internet posting, Atmar said:

"We haven't found a requirement for high-speed communications to be necessary for our FTP'ed backups. Partial backups of only those files that were modified during the day before, when done with MPE's store-to-disc and FTP'ed from one HP 3000 to another, have tended to be very, very quick -- at least in our instance. We don't modify that many files in the course of one day. We've been doing this now for several years.

"Every once and a while, to insure perfect synchrony with the second HP 3000, we either FTP everything over or physically just take our backup tapes to the second machine and restore them, more out of paranoia than anything else. We have never had the slightest indication that the two machines ever get out of synch. The partial stores seem to be doing the trick. The nice thing about this arrangement is that the target HP 3000 you're backing up to doesn't have to be very big, be very fast or have a large user limit. At worst, it only needs to have a lot of disc space.

"We do essentially the same thing with our PCs on the same network, but using completely different software. We purchased RhinoSoft's Serv-U FTP server for one PC in order to allow it to act as a server. We also purchased their FTP Voyager scheduler for all of the others. Every night beginning at 4AM, each of the machines in staggered order FTP's their most recently modified files to the server PC. At 4:30AM the process reverses, where each machine downloads in turn all of the files that it either doesn't have or it finds that were more recently modified than the copy that's resident on the PC, so that by morning all six PCs will contain all of the same files. We don't have to do a full-synchronization backup with the PCs as we do with the HP 3000. The manner by which FTP Voyager works, we can guarantee that the machines are perfectly in synch with one another.

"Although we have more PCs than just these six, these are the only machines we backup in this manner; the rest we don't really care if we lose anything. Nonetheless, we could easily back up a hundred machines during the night if we wanted to. The processes go really quite quickly. The MPE store-to-disc/MPE-to-MPE FTP solution cost us nothing to implement. The RhinoSoft solution cost less that $200."

Can FTP and Store to Disc take the place of networked backup software? Managers who don't have any budget can get along with such a solution, but that's not really the point of the advice that resonates with us. Instead of thinking that the lack of gigabit LAN networking is a show-stopper for 3000s -- HP's been told in the last System Improvement Ballot to work on it for MPE -- think of what the system has gained that you might use to stop that gap, like FTP.