Jeff Vance from HP has put out an HP response to the SIB '05 request that I,
as MPE Forum Chair, and John Burke, as SIG MPE Co-Chair circulated a few
weeks ago. I realized that I had not summarized all the inputs I have
received. So, here they are with a large number from Donna Garverick, SIG
MPE Co-Chair and others in the community. Thanks to all who responded.

1.  ftp -- security protection for netrc files.  currently, both read
and execute access are required to use a netrc file.  this exposes the
password to anyone with read capability.  requesting that ftp be
modified to need execute-only access -- similar to udc and command file
access.

2. ftp -- site chmod.  enable mpe's ftp to issue 'site chmod' commands.
user would be able to correct rwx permissions during an ftp 'session'.
this capability is already supported in hp-ux's ftp.

3. mpe -- help text corrections.  many typos exist in the help
subsystem.  additionally, recent ci enhancments are not included.
requesting a final clean-up of this text.

4. mpe -- finfo ci function.  finfo doesn't report on hfs namespace
files correctly (probably a problem with flabelinfo).  since finfo is
closely related to jfinfo and pinfo, it should return status values as
well.  also, finfo should follow symbolic links.

5.  mpe -- debug.  repair old/known bug regarding data breakpoints.
very important for support after 2006 (right, stan? :-)

6.  mpe -- copy.  copy command can't copy temporary files to hfs
namespace.  this is an HPFCOPY() internal bug.

7.  mpe -- listgroup.  add 'format=detail' option.  similar to
'listacct'.

8.  mpe -- pattern matching bug (impacts 'listfile', 'store', etc).
for store in particular, this could mean some files fail the pattern
match and are not stored.  see jeff vance for details.

9.  mpe -- repair to call_3 and exec_0 procedures.  fix the NL and XL
so that all call_3, exec_0 procedures validate parms, required for
system protection against hackers.

10. mpe -- ci.  ci evaluator operator precedence bug.  see jeff vance
for details.

11. mpe -- ci.  repair ci error messages with typos or
incorrect/inadequate text.

12. mpe -- implied run.  repair implied run function to parse
parameters correctly.

13. mpe -- input ci function.  input;wait does not work in batch.

14. mpe -- listacct.  repair parmeter parsing and error reporting bugs.

15. mpe -- purge.  problem with purge improperly purging files when
used in batch.

16. mpe -- acctinfo/groupinfo ci functions.  requesting two new ci
function be created.  both would return data currently available via
listacct and listgroup but the data would not have to parsed.

17.  backporting.  (still) requesting that several recent ci
enhancements (like pinfo, ci functions and shutdown) be backported to
7.0 and 6.5.

18. perl -- request a filecode for PERL (or, opening/reading and
looking at the first line, or looking at ".pl" suffix?) that will
trigger the CI into automatically running perl scripts.

19. perl -- it is on invent3k and you can compile it yourself but
the request is to just be able to install it.

20. perl -- The CI already has been enhanced to accept "#" as an alternative
to
":COMMENT ".  Now just use your imagination a little bit and you could
almost use the existing, standard unix-ish "trigger" by starting the
script file with "#!/usr/bin/perl".

21. mpe -- Modify the RESTORE command to allow the ONVS= parameter,
like in the STORE command, so specific volume set(s) can be restored.
This would be very valuable when all the accounts in the system volume
set are needed to be restored after a drive failure. Or, all accounts
in a specific user volume set.

22. mpe -- request is for a function that will return the amount of
remaining
space in your environment variable stack.

23. formspec -- fix the problem with renumbering V/PLUS forms in interactive
mode.

24. mpe -- Request the ALLOW command to be persistent.

25. spooler -- Request spool file % printed.

26. mpe -- fix character substitution in comments. "/" is now being replaced
with spaces.

27. image -- fix an issue with image b-trees and dbfind. If you do a
wildcard
find on a master, then try to read thru the found entries,and for each,
dbfind
detail under the master and read them.  After hitting the detail, the next
dbget
on the master would get confused and report end-of-chain.

28. mpe -- fix the problem of the MPE Logging facility when it
overflows/restarts the ID# that it generates and assigns to each unique
OPENLOG. Seems this ID# is simply an integer that is incremented for each
OPENLOG,
and when it reaches 65,536, the next OPENLOG causes it to restart from the
beginning at 1. However, it does not check to see if the process which
originally
was assigned a number is still connected to logging.  So on a system which
has a
long-running background job also has a lot of open/close logging events
which roll this unique ID#, one can end-up with multiple running processes
which are logging events using the same ID#.

If there were any others I missed, please let me know.




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 CDR Paul Edwards USNR Ret.       HP 3000/9000 Certified Consultant
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