It turns out that some of the functions within MPE iX depend upon the purchaseable Network Services (NS/3000) Subsystem Product.

At least three areas are directly affected:

1) Syslist processing in multi-threading;
2) JAVA programs executing on the HP e3000;
3) Native Mode Terminal I/O.

These are only three broad areas which are affected and judging from some of the problems posted here on HP3000-L, there may be more.

In the specific case of Java, the sample program to connect to the HP JDBC and access the sample MUSIC database through SQL for IMAGE, when you entered the server name and hit return, without NS, the program would go into an infinite loop until aborted. The reason was that the iostream expected an io interrupt in fcontrol which does not work if you do not have NS.

My congratulations and deep thanks go to Susan Gregory at the HP Response Center for discovering this problem while trying to implement multi-threading. I was investigating "webifying" the HP 3000 at our site to replace some long standing legacy TRANSACT programs. As part of this effort, I was experimenting with sockets, CREATEPROCESS, Remote Procedure Calls, and multi-threading. It was puzzling that the simple multi-threading C program wasn't displaying any output on our machine, while it worked just fine in the HP LAB.

Amongst the various efforts we mounted to discover the cause and solution to these problems, we discovered that without NS, we were using the old compatibility mode terminal I/O drivers and that there was no way to activate the native mode terminal I/O.

We worked almost seven months to discover why Java was not working properly on our machine, and almost five months on the multi-threading problem. We also discovered that the JDBC would not work properly with JAVA 1.2 and above.

HP offered us NS/3000 discounted 100% to resolve our problem:  We did have to pay maintenance, but did receive $6,700 worth of software for $509, after all that was said and done.

The Network Services Subsystem has apparently resolved the problems, although we are still working through some of the Java JDBC issues.

It is easy to see how this situation might develop. The HP developers and testers had full access to NS while they were developing FOS products and would not have discovered the problem without turning off NS. It was only a customer working on what might be considered the leading edge of e-commerce tools without NS that would have discovered the problem.

It is my suspicion that other parts of communication may encounter problems. I am thoroughly checking out Java, the JDBC, Apache, JServer, mult-threading, RPC, and related products before making any kind of committment.

For the HP Community at large, and particularly now that communication services from MPE iX 5.5 and beyond tend to relegate the need for NS/3000 to a lesser status, I would encourage those interested in e-commerce and using the HP e3000 as a web server to carefully consider their options:  It might be good to encourage HP through Interex to embed critical NS functions and routines used by products in the FOS, such as Java, into FOS. If this is not done, it is fairly clear at this point, that you will either have to pay for NS ($5,000 to $11,000 depending upon tier) or you will have to do without some of the products offered "free" for use, like Java.

I have to say that this point, I don't really care if you advocate critical functions be integrated into FOS, since we have the product we need to proceed with Java, Apache, JServer, multi-threading, sockets, and the such. But you should look at the proposition, for, if you do not, you may have to spend considerably more time and money on a "tinker toy" set to build your Internet Applications.

Again, our thanks go to Susan Gregory for her tenacious pursuit of these problems and their solution.