Q: I need to add storage to my HP 3000. I've searched through the archives of HP3000-L and it appears that many people put standard Seagate or IBM or other SCSI drives on their HP 3000 with no problems. I've got both SE and FW interfaces on my HP3000 987. Is the FW LVD or HVD? I have several 36gig LVD drives but I don't know if they'll work on my HP 3000.

A: Denys Beuchemin replied:

The SE connection is a FAST SCSI-2 Single Ended connection. The "FW" connection to which you refer is actually a Fast-Wide Differential SCSI-2 connection. You can only add HVD disk drives to the latter. I have used a fairly extensive variety of SCSI disk drives in the systems here, and I like both Seagate and IBM drives. The difficulty will be finding HVD disk drives. These seem to be out of production everywhere as the industry has gone over to LVD in the UltraSCSI, UltraSCSI2, Ultra160 and Ultra320 guise. However, you should be able to find these drives on the open market. I believe the largest HVD drive is 36GB, but I may be wrong.

You can also buy the LVD drives and connect them to your SE SCSI port, but that would be a waste of high performance hardware, as the interface will only work at the lowest speed on the chain. Another idea would be to get an HVD to LVD converter, and such can be found at www.paralan.com and other sites.

Q: I am looking for a method to check whether a particular listener job is currently accessing a data base.

A: Jon Diercks replied:

LISTF database,8>$NEWPASS
/bin/grep '-q JOBNAME' <$OLDPASS
IF CJCW = 0 THEN
  BINGO
ELSE
  NOTBINGO
ENDIF

Q: I copied the configuration file but cannot use the command chown to change owner. I'm logged on as MANAGER.SYS. What am I doing wrong?

shell/iX> cp /SENDMAIL/PUB/sendmail-8.9.1-m/cf/cf/mpeix.cf /etc/sendmail.cf
shell/iX> chown SERVER.SENDMAIL /etc/sendmail.cf
chown: file "/etc/sendmail.cf": Invalid argument

A: Guy Paul and Mark Bixby replied:

The existing file probably doesn't have an group owner assigned to the file. For some reason, if that is the case, MPE won't allow you to change the owner unless you also specify the group owner as well. Do

chown SERVER.SENDMAIL:SENDMAIL /etc/sendmail.cf

Q: I inadvertently typed the name of my HP e3000 in the following command on my desktop PC:

C:\WINDOWS\Desktop> net time \\HP979

It returned the following display:

Current time at \\HP979 is 5/9/2001 hh:mm
The command was completed successfully.

where hh:mm is the same as that displayed by SHOWTIME on the HP979. Adding the parameters /SET and /YES to the above command makes my PC clock = the HP979's clock. Is this time being returned by Samba or is it being supplied from somewhere else?

A: John Clogg replied:

Yes, Samba is responding to the NET TIME request. [Editor's note: see net.digest for more neat Samba tricks.]

Q: I have a client with a brand new N440. On one drive the device ID is reported differently between dstat and sysinfo:

DSTAT ALL

LDEV-TYPE    STATUS  VOLUME VOLUME SET - GEN
----------   ------- ----------------------------------
...
40-MAJ3182MC UNKNOWN <==========

Sysinfo

Ldev Path Device Type Device ID
...
40 1/12/0/0.8.0 Disk ST318404LC <===============

Does it really matter?

A: Stan Sieler replied:

The MAJ3182MC is a Fujitsu 18.2GB Ultra3 SCA-80pin SCSI HDD, a 10,000 RPM, 4.7-millisecond average seek time disk drive. The ST318404LC is a Seagate 10,000 RPM, 5-millisecond access time disk drive.

SYSINFO always reports the device ID you configure, which may or may not be the correct device ID. DSTAT ALL tries to report the actual device ID.

As it happens, you can tell SYSGEN that ldev 40 is an "MAJ3182MC", at least on 7.0 Express 1 (i.e., that device ID is in IODFAULT.PUB.SYS).

I recommend having SYSGEN's configuration reflect reality, where possible.

Q: I zipped up a few files using PKZIP for Windows on an NT 4.0 machine, FTP'd the archive file to one of my HP e3000s and tried to unzip it with

SYS-C:run /SYS/HPBIN/UNZIP;info="-l /SYS/HPBIN/z0test"

but get a long error message that basically says it cannot find the zip file directory. What am I missing?

A: Neil Harvey replied:

I have seen this often, and it's usually because I didn't ftp the file across properly.

When ftp-ing a zip file from NT to MPE, I always try to remember,

hash
bin
quote type L 8
put c:\nt.zip /tmp/nt.zip
quit

Q: I have a command file where the user enters in the dfid number of a spoolfile. If it's there, it displays correctly. If it is not there, the command file aborts. How do I trap the fact that the file does not exist and start over.

ECHO PLEASE INPUT THE DFID NUMBER
INPUT DFIDNUM
LISTF O!DFIDNUM.OUT.HPSPOOL,0
IF CIERR <> 0
ECHO NON-EXISTENT FILE - TRY AGAIN
ELSE
...display file

A: Robert Mills replied: Use the finfo function as in

ECHO PLEASE INPUT THE DFID NUMBER
INPUT DFIDNUM
if not finfo('O!DFIDNUM.OUT.HPSPOOL','exists') then
ECHO NON-EXISTENT FILE - TRY AGAIN
ELSE
...display file

Q: There are five date/time stamps stored on each file label: created, modified, accessed, allocated and status change. The first three can be seen with :LISTF,3 and the other two can be accessed via FINFO(). Does anyone know the specific rules for when the alloc and/or status dates are updated? I couldn't find an answer in docs.hp.com or the list archives. In general trial and error, "allocated" usually matches "created" and "status change" usually matches "modified", but for both I have seen cases where they differ.

A: Lars Appel and others replied:

The "allocated" timestamp reflects when the disk space was allocated for the file. This is usually the same as the "created" timestamp, but one example where they can be different is in the case of :RESTORE;OLDDATE - the create date will show the original create date, the allocated date will show the restore date.

The "status change" timestamp is required by Posix. From the Posix perspective, file status is modified when the file's Owner or GroupID attributes are altered, when file permissions or link count are changed and (for directories) when an entry in the directory is added or removed. To support these requirements MPE added a new State-Change timestamp for all files. One example command that causes "status change" to be different from "modified date" is

:/bin/touch '-a <filename>'

Q: Can someone tell me how to determine the hardware address of any particular slot in a 9x8lx system? I've got an SE SCSI card I want to add and pre-configure.

A: Paul Edwards, Donna Garverick and Bob J replied:

The card slots are marked on the plastic cover. You just use the formula:

56/(card slot x 4).device address.0.

Make sure there is a PSEUDO device configured one level up for each scsi device.

Q: I used LINKEDIT with the ALTPROG command to put an XL onto a program. Now I want to take it off, but "ALTPROG progname;XL=" will not do it. What am I doing wrong?

A: Mark Klein, Neil Armstrong and Bruce Toback replied:

ALTPROG progname;XL=" " <--- Note the space is required between quotes

Q: Can anyone tell me how to remove a lockword from a file? I accidentally put one on while modifying a schema and I can't remove it.

A: Mike Hornsby and Ray Shahan replied:

RENAME FILEX/LOCKWORD,FILEX

Q: The new HP e3000 servers are known by their model numbers, "A400-100-110", etc. We currently have a "Nova" (927/LX). Are there code names for the A- and N-series?

A: Matt Shade replied:

N-Class -> Prelude
A-Class -> Crescendo

Q: I did an install of 6.5. Everything went fine. The version number at start up and in the SHOWME command display was 6.5.00. Being somewhat lazy I restored @.CONFIG.SYS from a backup of my 6.5.02 system. They are identical servers with identical disk arrays so the CONFIG files are interchangeable. The problem is that now my system says 6.5.02. Where in SYSGEN does it allow you to change the O/S version number?

A: Duane Percox and Lars Appel replied:

See IDP.CONFIG.SYS. And to set the right number, you can use SYSGEN MISC SYSTEM USERVERSION.

Q: I'm trying to get a patch from the ITRC, but FTP tells me it is to big:

Increase file limit and try again. (FTPERR 16)
226 Transfer complete.

Can anyone give me an idea on how to increase the file limit?

A: John Burke replied:

Try HELP BLDPARMS

Q: Is there a way to purge a list of directories?

A: Mark Bixby replied:

Use MPE :PURGEDIR if you want to use MPE wildcards such as @, and POSIX rmdir from the POSIX shell if you want to use POSIX wildcards such as *.

Q: I have some Perl programs put together that I need to run at certain times of the day. I understand I can set these up as scheduled jobs, but is there a special way I have to set up the job stream to actually execute a Perl program? Is there a way to run a Perl program from the CI prompt?

A: Mark Bixby replied:

If you have a Perl script named test.pl, you could execute it directly from the CI (job or session, doesn't matter!) like this:

:XEQ /PERL/PUB/perl test.pl

Q: I am trying to create a new acct with a single group. The account creates ok, but I get the following creating the group:

:newgroup DRLTEST.AUTOMATC;homevs=main_volume_set
:newgroup DRLTEST.AUTOMATC;onvs=main_volume_set
Non-existent account. (CIERR 909)

A: Jon Backus and Keven Miller replied:

Just as the NEWGROUP command needs to be done twice, once for the system, once for the user volume set, the NEWACCT command needs to be done twice.

NEWACCT acct,MGR
NEWACCT acct,MGR;ONVS=xxxx

Q: How do I set up "press any key to continue" in a command file?

A: Jon Diercks, Robert Mills and John MacLerran replied:

As a CI command,

     input x,'Press any key to continue:';readcnt=1

and as a function,

     input dummy, 'Press [x] to continue... ',,1