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Solid software for HP Servers |
Highlights from our recent on-line customer news. The links and full articles are available at www.robelle.com/news |
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What’s Up DOCumentation
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The
Summit users meeting will be held May 17-20 at La Costa resort near San Diego,
with a golf tournament on May 16. Bob and Mary Ann Green from Robelle will
attend. Bob Green will be presenting a training session on Suprtool and Qedit
during the conference: Title:
Special Suprtool/Qedit Features for Summit Users Description:
Those migrating to HP-UX will receive all Robelle tools, including MPE
versions. Learn some powerful data manipulation features for working with
Summit application data. Our
move into our new quarters in Surrey BC went fine last month. By Monday we were
open for business, phones were ringing and email was being answered. Since
we moved across town we had to get new phone numbers: Office
Phone : 604.501.2001 The
old numbers will be forwarded for 6 months. The Tech support phone is unchanged
at 800.453.8970 What Are Your Favorite
Enhancements? As
our all-time favorite improvements to HP 3000 Software, we all agreed that disc
caching for the original MPE was a fabulous. It not only boosted the
performance of the existing HP 3000s dramatically, but the timing was perfect.
It was released just in time to save the bacon of a lot of HP sites while they
were waiting for the new RISC processors to be released. Click the link to see
all-star improvements to MPEX, IMAGE, Qedit, Suprtool and more. John
Bawden of QualChoice writes: "Been
reading the newsletter
since 1988 and it has provided many good tips that have saved me time and
effort and increased my HP 3000 knowledge. Robelle's support and service are
consistently among the best in the business." Homesteading and MPE TipsThe
first in a series of interviews with frontline people about the state of the
3000 world. This time it is Taylor Lumpkin of Hire Experience, an Ecometry
expert out of Delray Beach Florida who provides reports, extracts, interfaces,
bug fixes, modifications, tech support, system review, EDI, XML, and whatever
else his Ecometry customers require. Clients of his firm include Brookstone,
Childcraft, Lego, Hickory Farms, and Tiger Direct. HP To Reconsider Converting 9000s to 3000s Here is the quote from Ross McDonald, MPE/iX R&D Director of Engineering: " We are reviewing the complex situation regarding HP 9000 to HP e3000 conversions. As recently as HP World 2003, we said that we would not pursue this. However, after listening to the input provided by the OpenMPE Board, we have reopened the subject. So far, we have had limited internal discussions on this topic. We intend to provide an update in June 2004." Ron
Seybold of the 3000 Newswire brought this announcement to our attention. The
Newswire also points out that this doesn't mean that HP are going to run MPE on
HP-UX - they are talking about allowing MPE itself to run on 9000 PA-RISC
hardware, which has the same instruction set and I/O architecture as the 3000
hardware. And
it doesn't mean they have promised anything yet. However, such conversions
would give existing 3000 users new alternatives for server upgrades. But there
would still exist the issue of who would verify that MPE actually works on the
9000 hardware (probably not HP!). Here
is what they say on their web site: "Since 1978, Datagate Inc. has been
the largest alternative support company for Hewlett Packard computer and
instrumentation systems. Our excellent company reputation has been established
by providing THE highest quality maintenance support in the industry...
Nationwide support, with Customer Engineers (CE´s) averaging over 10 years of
experience. DATAGATE has never considered any HP product obsolete. We service
all HP equipment regardless of age." DDS
Cartridge-Drive Compatibility This
chart by APPIC on the OpenMPE site shows DDS tape cartridges from 60m to 170m
in size (1.6 Gbyte to 72 Gbyte) versus DDS drives from DDS-1 to DDS-5. For each
combination, it shows whether the drive can read or read and write the media.
Warning: the chart is in French and English. SIB (System Improvement Ballot) Results The
SIB results are posted on the OpenMPE web site. Check out the bottom of the
page and the number of homesteaders -- not sure that this is an accurate
reflection of the market, but is still quite a lot of homesteaders. The number
one requested tactical improvement was "network printing to work with
non-HP printers" via addition of a new pcl_supported = false option. Azurri
Computer Systems offer support (both hardware & software) on all HP
3000 servers (whether currently supported or not by HP). Their support services
will continue well past 2006 with no plans to discontinue HP 3000 support. Hat
tip for the link to: John Dunlop
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Hidden Value for February The
second February column from The 3000 Newswire is up at John Burke's web
site, with answers to questions such as "how do I find all the IMAGE
databases on a system?" and "What is the command to kill a session
that refuses to die?" - lots more good information. The
February column from The 3000 Newswire is up at John Burke's web site,
with good information on patches, Stage/iX, MPE/iX date formats on :Store
tapes, and DSCOPY vs FTP. Qedit Tips"I
absolutely LOVE QEDIT! It is helping to make the move off the HP3000 at least
bearable. I could never have lived with vi." Rex
Dickey, IT Director Qedit Enhancements - A Busy
Year! We
started 12 months go with a new release (version 5.4) that resurrected our
beloved "visual mode" on HP-UX 11 - after HP had changed the run-time
libraries to remove the block mode routine that Qedit used. We end the period
with another Version 5.5 - jam packed with enhancements. Suprtool TipsSuprtool/UX
version 4.7.12 has a new option that enables "fast block reading" for
Eloquence databases. Performance improvements can be up to five times. Another
important enhancement for Eloquence is that Suprtool will now dynamically load
whatever version of the Eloquence routines you have on your system. You can
also dynamically load test versions of the Eloquence libraries, to try with
Suprtool. HP-UX and Migration Planning Credit
Union Migration Story - Summit is converting a
number of sites from MPE to HP-UX every month, using Robelle's Suprtool and
Qedit in the process. Here are comments from one credit union. Transport Migration
Tools -From
Sungard-Bitech, developed since 1988, tools for migrating COBOL, KSAM, IMAGE,
VPLUS applications to UNIX. Sector 7 Migration Services -This
migration services firm uses the Sungard-Bitech Transport toolset, linked
above. HP-UX
Resources: HP-UX FAQ - Answers to Frequently
Asked Questions about HP-UX, the operating system of the HP 9000 line of
servers. HP-UX
Quick Reference -From the Univ of Iowa: Working with
Directories, Working with Files, Finding and Organizing, System Operations, and
Network Operations. HP-UX Documentation -The
HP corporate web site. HP-UX
Technical Articles - An excellent collection of technical tips
for running an HP-UX site, by Beechglen, with topics such as: Proper Patch
Installation Verification, Copying Data Utilizing CPIO, Creating a Bootable
Recovery Tape, Managing Mirrors, Mirroring the Root File System and Primary
Swap, and many more. Links/ Resources/ Industry News New ORBit
Product: Rosetta Store "Rosetta
Store is a new utility that lets you restore data from MPE backup tapes onto
non-MPE systems such as HP-UX. Besides just extracting the raw data from tape,
Rosetta Store knows the internal format of things like TurboImage databases so
it can actually provide the information in a format that’s immediately useful.
It knows how to convert TurboImage databases into Eloquence databases, XML, and
other formats. Not just databases but all kinds of MPE files can be restored
using Rosetta Store." Some
Useful Free Programs for the 3000 Allegro
provides a web home for many useful 3000 tools, including CHKTAPE to check tape
drive state (by Terry Tipton) and MASTEROP for job scheduling (by Carl Kemp).
Also programs that have been ported to the 3000: the Ruby and Python
programming languages, Analog to analyze web stats, Ploticus to display data,
and Tidy for format HTML. And many others that they wrote themselves, separate link. This
Beechglen web site has many useful scripts and programs (store-to-disk format)
such as a utility to dynamically change the logon prompt to display a message
*before* users attempt to log on, and a command file to translate subsys and
err numbers, plus many others. |