SIGMPE: Clouds lifting over MPE’s future

Meeting delivers updates on six months of positive CSY development

By John Burke

Even though the top vote getters on the SIGMPE ballot did not fare particularly well under the new Software Improvement Ballot (SIB) process, this year’s HP World SIGMPE meeting was decidedly more upbeat than last year’s. Flashback for a moment to HP World 2000, when the e3000 division at HP (CSY) had to report that not a single item on the SIB had been worked on, and you can understand why optimism was high this year after six months of positive developments from CSY. Last year SIGMPE even broke up early under a general cloud of pessimism. This year’s meeting filled the room and all two hours allotted — and then some.

Jeff Vance of CSY gave an update on the status of the top SIB items in general and those of interest to SIGMPE in particular. Vance said the process used this year created a SIB ballot containing items that were doable in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of effort. All items were vetted by CSY prior to the creation of the ballot, and CSY committed to providing engineering resources to address at least some of the top 10 items from the final balloting. Vance reported that four of the top 10 items had been or would shortly be delivered, and that several others were in progress.

SIGMPE had two items make that top 10 of SIB. The number 1 item by a large margin on the SIGMPE ballot was Stan Sieler’s disk partitioning proposal. The scope of this item was significantly reduced to gain a spot on the SIB, so the proposal now addresses only the current limit of 4Gb usable space on LDEV 1. As standard disks get larger and larger, this is an increasingly annoying limitation. In this form, the item finished third in the SIB balloting. Vance reported that the LDEV 1 4Gb mitigation project has been staffed, but HP has set no projected completion date.

The other SIB item was the third most popular item in SIGMPE balloting: “Implement global user-writeable CI variables.” Vance reported the system CI variable project has not been staffed and is currently on hold. Part of the problem with this enhancement request is that while nice to have, there is no risk in not doing it. A workaround that uses UDCs and files in the Posix namespace to emulate global CI variables is available on the CSY Jazz Web server. The chief disadvantage of this approach is that you cannot de-reference these “variables” in a script.

CSY engineer Mark Bixby gave an update on the status of various ports:

• Perl 5.6.1 and NTP 4.1.0 are now on Jazz now. These are the most current versions.

• OpenSSL 0.9.6a is available on Jazz.

• PHP will be available on Jazz soon.

• Samba 2.0.10 (with encrypted password support) is coming soon.

• A new version of Apache will be available soon.

The meeting included a lively discussion on the Interex Shared Source Program. Representatives of CSY indicated a willingness to accept back enhancements, but it was determined there is a disconnect between those who would enhance programs and CSY. Another problem is the learning curve associated with CVS, the preferred distribution method for contributions.

The final agenda item was a discussion of the 2001 SIG MPE ballot results and an initial cut at creating the 2002 SIGMPE ballot. The top 10 vote getters (out of 28) were:

1. Disk Partitioning

2. Mirrored System Volume Set

3. Global CI variables

4. “Open” existing network LDEV

5. Permanent ALLOW

6. Process level files, file equations and variables

7. Prevent user CI HP@ variables

8. PM capability program location

9. Add LPR/LPD to spooler

10. CI API for user functions

SIG members decided that items 2 and 5 would be transferred to SIG SYSMAN, and item 9 would be dropped from the 2002 ballot. Item nine is functionality currently available from third parties, and CSY has clearly indicated no resources would be committed to this. Item 8 will have “libraries” added to the description.