Greetings from Sunnyvale :-)  IPROF is going well.  For those
nay-sayers that think IPROF is just a bunch of tripe, I can now
confirm that there is tripe involved.  Just a few hours ago I
was having dinner with two anonymous HP3000-L'ers (names removed
to protect the guilty) at a Korean BBQ buffet across the street
where they did indeed consume tripe, beef gut, octopus, squid,
and even some normal food.  So if you can't stomach the SIGs, go
across the street and eat stomach :-)

But I digress...

SIGSYSMAN met yesterday (Thursday) and covered several agenda
items, but due to shortage of their time we carried over some
of their items into SIGMPE today.  We had an update from Gopi
of CSY Bangalore on last year's top 10 requests, an update from
Jeff Vance on jinfo and other enhancements (customer funded
enhancements) in 6.0, thanks from Pam Bennett for the folks that
made the CFE program work, a brief NT/MPE interoperability
update from Gary Border, user input on new agenda items from
the attendees, and some rambling by yours truly to try to fill
in the dead air at the trailing half hour of the meeting when
we had perhaps reached our burn-out point.

The bottom line was to update the improvement ballot with regard
to the existing items and adding some new ones.  I plan to issue
an official "ballot" for prioritizing these items in the near
future (hey, not now, it's David Letterman time!) but here's a
quick recap of the existing and new issues with my comments
mixed within the agenda items.  These are in order by priority
in the 1998 SIB.
---------------------------------
Have MPE/iX SHOWOUT show % complete, just like MPE V/E
  Not currently planned

'Windows like' user interface
  No mention and no discussion

Enhance the MPE :ALLOW command to apply to users logged on or not.
(Less inclusive than ALLOW @.@)
  In progress

Ability To kill a PIN and not whole session/job
  In progress (:abortproc), unclear of any benefit over :debug kill
  for eliminating deadlocks/resource contention

Disc mirroring on system volume set
  No plans for software mirroring, large effort.  Suggest using arrays.
  Pointed out this currently leaves single point-of-failure should you
  have a channel/controller failure (MPE doesn't support alternate path
  to a redundant controller).  Confirmed with CSY (Jeff Vance, Dave
Wilde)
  that a HAFO (High Availability Fail Over) enhancement is on the way to
  provide support for alternate path.  Unknown when this will be
available
  or if it will be a free add-on.

Allow system-wide user defined variables on MPE/XL systems to enhance
CI-programming
  Scripts available on jazz to emulate this, although it does require
  you invoke the scripts; not integrated into showvar/hpcigetvar/etc.

CI-level Pipes
  Not currently planned.

Improved interoperability between MPE and Posix
  The 6.0 release has smoother, cleaned install.  Additional agenda item
  added later specifically addressing "posix smoothing" which was seen
to
  be a separate issue.

Need a DISALLOW command to disable MPE commands.
  Part of permanent allow project, in progress.

Provide record level locking in KSAM
  Not currently planned.

Provide a STREAM intrinsic
  Still considered but not actively funded; some side-effect complexity.

Ability to do a STARTSESS for an IP Address
  If this means "start a session on a remote terminal emulator" cannot
  be done.  If this means STARTSESS for a nonstandard telnet port,
maybe.
  Still not currently planned other than alternate CI (see later).

Background/Foreground CI processing
  Not planned, no discussion other than add posix shell to the request.
  No background processing available now except via third-party (MPEX,
etc).

Measurement Interface (MI) for TurboIMAGE performance data.
  Not planned and no discussion other than some MPE/V products that had
  some of this functionality but never ported to MPE/iX.

Ability to rename a file across volume sets
  Suggest we drop this item as mv.hpbin.sys (posix 'mv') can do this,
  as well as :copy/:purge.

Ability to rename a group
  No discussion.

Indicate BREAKJOB, RESUMEJOB on $STDLIST of affected job
  No discussion.

make REDO callable from other HP subsystems.
  No discussion.

Add new parm to :SPOOLF to adjust copies remaining
  No discussion.

Provide access to modem signals on serial ports
Support terminals with 132 columns
  No discussion on either, may come up in SIG/UI-VPLUS

SQL Enabling Extensions for the PERL scripting language)
  SQL modules available now, including Oracle module, for perl5.  Not
  yet tested on MPE.

Allow easier access to IMAGE and ALLBASE from POSIX programs.
  Problems with fork() while DB is open noted.  CSY stated that if we
  restrict this to fork() while database is "stable" - no locks in
  effect, no DB[X]BEGIN, etc., makes this perhaps a feasible request;
  otherwise it's a show stopper - what to do when forking while a
  transaction in progress with locks in place?

NEW ITEMS FROM SIGMPE/IPROF'99

Expand :console to support multiple ldevs and 'syslog' option to write
to syslogd and/or multiple ldevs simultaneously.

Provide :shutdown command at a minimum, preferably with a :reboot as
well.  Note this is NOT like the AUTOBOOT as autoboot is unconditional.
This would enable a 'dead shutdown' in the event of system abort while
giving you a reboot option if you are remotely updating a system.

Expand existing ISV/etc certifications to the user base to provide
MPE certifications for system managers, programmers, and/or operators.
This may be expansion of the existing programs or a new program, but
there is considerable interest in some sort of formal certification.

Posix smoothing - missing functionality, commands, socket handling in
networked applications, etc., etc., etc.

HSC and/or Fiber Channel support for the 3000.

Logon process improvements - don't go through entire :hello and the
password routines only to receive 'can't initiate new sessions now'.

Logon process improvements - provide an 'initial connection' text
option for DTC/telnet/VT sessions to output a security disclaimer or
similar text when connecting to the 3000, not unlike the 9000's use
of /etc/project or the telnetd -b (banner) option.  Current use of
workarounds expand on the 'login prompt' but this is unsupported
and transient.  Suggest some file in PUB.SYS that if it exists,
display the text of the file before the *initial* login prompt.

Provide a translation mechanism between an 8-char unix-style username
and an MPE user.account equivalent for use by ftp, sendmail, remsh,
and other unix-centric services.

Fix long-standing :debug bugs (e.g., data breakpoint risks).  For
hard details contact Stan <[log in to unmask]>.

Have inetd insure that it is running at CS priority - as supplied now
the jinetd.net.sys job has no PRI= specification and typically defaults
to DS or ES queue; this can lead to telnet/ftp/etc timeouts on a busy
system.  Suggest that inetd issues getpriority() or similar call to
insure it runs at CS.  Nice additional enhancement if we can pass a
priority to services launched by inetd via some parameter rather than
them simply inheriting the priority of the root inetd process.

Dual boot capability (MPE/HPUX) assuming you have HP3000 hardware and
an HPUX license (details from Nick Demos).

Optimize directory traversal for listf, store, etc for machines with
large numbers of files.  One user (sorry, name escapes me) reports
store taking an hour or more to simply flag files prior to beginning
to write to tape.  Stan Sieler hinted that the current algorithms
were decidedly less than optimal.

Store to disk is currently only available in TurboStore 7x24.  Many
users expressed great interest in making this available in the FOS
store product and nobody had a good argument why this should be
restricted to the 7x24 version as it has nothing to do with 7x24.
These disk image store files are restorable by the FOS store and
several vendors expressed an interest in distributing their products
in this format, avoiding the multiple-MOVER-version/RYDER/etc
confusion.  It was also pointed out that the FOS restore from a disk
image backup should be "forgiving" relative to the data format as the
typical problem is not properly getting the file attributes just right
when uploading from a PC or other platform.

Hope that is suitable for now, I will follow up later.  For those of
you who are not here at IPROF, you were missed!  And you missed some
great tripe, at least from second-hand reports :-)

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>