Michael writes:

> I need some help from someone with Reflections, and Reflections technical
>  knowledge. I don't have Reflections here, wish I did. But I have a script
>  & and some programs that I want to work correctly on Reflections,
>  Minisoft, and possibly QCTERM as well.
>  The script(Command file) should transfer a file from MPE to the local
>  workstation. It can also be call programmatically from the HPCICOMMAND
>  intrinsic. SYNTAX is:
>
>  HPTOPC "C:\Directory\Filename.txt mpefile.group.account"

Unfortunately, I doubt that you will ever be able to write a script that will
universally work with all three terminal emualtors, Reflection, Minisoft, and
QCTerm, simply becuase it is not our intention to put into QCTerm a
Reflection workalike script. We will put in a scripting construct in QCTerm,
but it will be of our own making, primarily directed at web-launching QCTerm.

But Michael's comments bring back the point that I asked about two months ago
-- and for which I received a great number of comments, and let me thank you
all for those again.

The point is/was then: do we really want to be doing this (downloading files
from a host & executing programs on the PC) in the era of the internet? There
is simply no end to the amount of damage that can be done to an
internet-connected PC once these capabilities are in an emulator and the
knowledge on how to use them becomes widely available.

During the two months since I last asked the question, I've been playing with
the bit of shareware, the Serv-U FTP server (http://ftpservu.deerfield.com),
that I've mentioned before, and I've only grown more impressed with what I
can do with over that time. In fact, during that time, I've gotten so
impressed with this product that I feel we need to either duplicate all of
its FTP server behavior in QCTerm, or none of it. I'm leaning towards the
latter, simply because those people who would want to use this behavior can
purchase a well-designed product for a very reasonable price on their own
immediately.

I've also gotten more impressed with the simplicity and the universality of
FTP site commands. A PC comes with a native FTP client (that is, you can
download files from a remote server, but no one can upload files from your
PC, which is exactly how you would want things in a no-configuration
universe). However, to make your PC into a "server", you have to add some
software. In this case, I can very readily recommend the Serv-U FTP server.

With this bit of software on a PC, I can:

     o control and limit access to a specific range of IP addresses in a
manner very similar to INETDSEC procedure on the HP3000,

     o have a very much better transaction logging file than exists on the
HP3000,

     o but most importnatly, download & upload files to and from the PC under
a simple HP3000 job process, as well as execute programs on the PC from the
same job, completely controlling everything from within the HP3000 job cards.

Originally, we were using the Serv-U FTP server on one PC, a $400 e-machine
that sits right next to one of our 918s, only as a mechanism to be able to
download HP3000-created PostScript files into a copy of Adobe Acrobat
Distiller that resides on the PC to convert them into PDF, and then
automatically transfer the newly converted PDF files either to a web server
or e-mail them out to individual recipients. While this works extremely well,
I seem to find a new use for keeping at least one PC running Serv-U every
week or two.

[I actually have a picture of the e-machine that is "attached" to the 918 via
FTP on the web. I took some pictures of the calendar production process and
put them up on our website, but decided not to mention them. Now those
pictures may have some value. I consider the little $400 e-machine to be an
attached, outboard "neural mass" to the HP3000.

The picture of interest in that regard is the bottom image at:

     http://www.aics-research.com/calendar.html

With FTP, I can control all of the processes that I might have wanted to do
on the HP3000 (Adobe Acrobat distillation, web serving, e-mail, etc.) from an
HP3000 job card at least as well as I could from the POSIX shell, but with
the added caveat -- which is important to a great number of our customers --
that their HP3000s not be directly connected to the internet. While this 918
*is* connected to the internet, it is nonetheless a very simple procedure to
hide it behind our NAT router.]

Loading Serv-U onto every PC that you wish to download files to/execute
programs on/or otherwise control seems to me to be the safest, most reliable
way to perform what a number of people on this list want to do, and not try
to accomplish this through a terminal emulator script. There is a great deal
of security built into the FTP process that is either not present or very
difficult to recreate in the emulator scripts.

Secondly, it is a "standard" process, completely independent of any terminal
emulator vendor, and that is always probably a good idea. It means that your
download processes can be made completely independent of whatever terminal
emulator you're using or the particular version of the emulator.

Wirt Atmar