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MPE System Improvement Ballot, 2004

Tactical Portion of the SIB

Jeff Vance at Virtual CSY in Cupertino (jeff.vance at hp dot com) has released HP's response to the "tactical" requests in the recent SIB. Below is Jeff's announcement:

Thanks to the 223 people who took time to vote on this year's System Improvement Ballot (SIB). For the first time there were two separate voting sections on the SIB. The first section covered strategic issues, which typically require business and/or policy decisions from HP management. The second section contained more traditional enhancement requests, which usually are easier for us to answer based on evaluating destabilizing risks to the operating system, and assessing the overall engineering effort. There were eight strategic items, where voters were granted 30 votes apiece, and 18 tactical items, where voters were allowed 60 votes each. The ballot and results can be found at: http://www.interex.org/advocacy/survey/2004mpe_results.html

We have incorporated the Strategic SIB items into our business planning process and will give you an update at HP World. The following is our response to the tactical items.

Tactical SIB update:

Summary:

At this time we intend to fully or partially implement seven out of the top 15 requested items, including the top two items: network printing and ftp security enhancements. We are saying no to seven of top 15 items; however, two of the seven have usable scripting work-arounds. We don't yet have an answer for one item (SCSI pass-thru) which is currently being investigated. "In plan" in this context means that we are planning on implementing the requested item.

Details:

  1. "Network printing to work with non-HP printers by adding a pcl_supported = false option in NPCONFIG.PUB.SYS. If this option is paired with pjl_supported = false, the spooler would just dump the ASCII data to the printer and strip any PCL sequences from the beginning of the spool file. No device status checking and reporting, failure recovery, imbedded PCL sequences, or handling of CCTL information would be done. The customer would be responsible for ending each of the spool files with a form feed command to flush the last page. HEADON would not be supported."

    1429 total votes, 140 individual votes.

    Status: In plan.

  2. "Request that MPE's FTP server be enabled to support 'ftpusers' (users not allowed access to the FTP server) and 'ftpaccess' (files not allowed to be retrieved), like FTP on UNIX. The addition of these files would allow a system manager more granular control of an MPE system. These features would be valuable now and in the future (for homesteaders)."

    1422 total votes, 145 individual votes.

    Status: In plan. We plan on a full implementation of the ftpusers file and a partial implementation of the ftpaccess file. At this point, after a brief investigation, we believe we can support the following features controlled by ftpaccess: noretrieve, log commands, log transfers, deny option, and banner option. 'Noretrieve' seems to be the most desired ftpaccess feature.

  3. "Support gigabit LAN connectivity."

    1403 total votes, 114 individual votes.

    Status: No plans.

  4. "Enable FWSCSI card firmware level reporting and update immediately. ODE/MAPPER doesn't show the firmware level on FWSCSI and MFIO cards. This needs to be fixed. The suplicen password for FWSCSIPB in SYSDIAG or STM is needed to get the level information and update the firmware, if needed. A new procedure needs to be supplied for all users, regardless of HP support status, to update the firmware, downloaded from the ITRC, on an MPE/iX machine."

    1024 total votes, 110 individual votes.

    Status: Partial implementation: we plan on providing a privileged program which reports the firmware information. The updating aspect of this item will be addressed as part of our business decision-making.

  5. "Make future I&I open source products (Apache, Samba, Sendmail, etc...) include the source trees and build scripts used to create the binary releases starting with the current releases."

    989 total votes, 106 individual votes.

    Status: In plan.

  6. "System level CI variables. Enhance the CI to support variables whose scope is global to the entire system, not just a job or session as today. There will need to be restrictions on who can modify and delete system variables (maybe on who can create them too?). A global variable of the same name as a job/session variable will be found first to prevent them from being masked out. SHOWVAR may need to distinguish between system and job/session variables of the same name. The HPCIPUTVAR and HPCIGETVAR intrinsics may need to be enhanced to support this feature."

    908 total votes, 109 individual votes.

    Status: No plans. There is a script on Jazz which basically implements this feature very closely to an earlier internal design. Check out: http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/sysvars.txt for the script and there is documentation at: http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/sysvars.html

  7. "Keep Java for MPE up-to-date with the most current version available."

    890 total votes, 102 individual votes.

    Status: No plans.

  8. "Enhance MPE/iX to allow applications to send SCSI commands directly to SCSI devices (most likely to be implemented via POSIX ioctl() function). A primary goal will be to allow a "one I/O at a time" connection to most SCSI device types -- even types previously not supported by MPE/iX. NOTE: Devices will be limited those able to connect to existing HPe3000 Host Bus Adaptor cards (e.g. Parallel SCSI buses. For 9xx: SE and FW SCSI. For A/N-Class: HVD and LVD SCSI). Support of newer HBAs and connection protocols (e.g. 10Gbit FC, iSCSI, etc) will not be considered as part of this item".

    865 total votes, 110 individual votes.

    Status: Under Investigation. We are currently investigating this item to fully understand what the limits and restrictions are in MPE so we can communicate these restrictions and validate that this request, given the constraints, is still desired.

  9. "Add ability to the SHOWJOB command to see all jobs in a job queue: SHOWJOB JOB=@J;JOBQ=MYQUEUE. Enhance the existing SHOWJOB command so that it can filter output based on a user specified job queue name. Today, the ;JOBQ parameter alters the SHOWJOB display to report the job queue name for all reported jobs. When JOBQ=name is specified the existing job queue SHOWJOB format will be used. The job queue name can be wildcarded."

    804 total votes, 114 individual votes.

    Status: No plans. There is a script on Jazz which we believe meets most users' needs. See: http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/showj.txt

  10. "Local CI variables. Enhance the CI to support variables whose scope is local to the script or UDC in which they are defined. These variables would be deleted after the creating script/UDC ends. A local variable of the same name as a job/session variable would be found first. SHOWVAR may need to distinguish between local and job/session variables of the same name. The HPCIPUTVAR and HPCIGETVAR intrinsics may need to be enhanced to support this feature".

    661 total votes, 95 individual votes.

    Status: No plans.

  11. "SPOOLINFO CI functions. Similar to FINFO and JINFO, provide a CI function which provides information for a spoolfile, based on spoolfile # or spoolfile name."

    640 total votes, 96 individual votes.

    Status: In plan.

  12. "12 Add a filecode for Perl scripts and enhance the CI (and COMMAND/HPCICOMMAND) to automatically run perl scripts if they have a perl filecode or if their HFS name ends in '.pl'."

    401 total votes, 63 individual votes.

    Status: No plans.

  13. "DEVINFO CI functions. Similar to FINFO and JINFO, provide a CI function which provides information for a device, based on LDEV # or device name. This function could get the desired info from AIFDEVCLASSGET and/or AIFDEVICEGET."

    395 total votes, 80 individual votes.

    Status: In plan.

  14. "ACDs for root, accounts, and MPE group directories. Today the root directory, all accounts and all MPE groups do not support ACDs. This means the shell chmod command cannot operate on these directories, and system managers cannot restrict who can see (traverse) the contents of these directories. Thus, LISTF @.@.@ is able to display every file on a system, which could be controlled if this enhancement was implemented."

    377 total votes, 68 individual votes.

    Status: No plans.

  15. "VOLINFO CI functions. Similar to FINFO and JINFO, provide a CI function which provides information for a device, based on LDEV # or device name. This function could get the desired info from HPVOLINFO."

    345 total votes, 74 individual votes.

    Status: In plan.