John asked me to investigate and comment on the attached. The MPE/iX
version of PowerHouse does not use SORT.PUB.SYS or the HPSORTOUTPUT
intrinsic so we are not affected by that issue.

Note that we have just received notification of these patches along with
the rest of the HPe3000 community and have not yet installed them on our
machines.

Bob Deskin
Senior Product Manager
Application Development Tools
Cognos Incorporated
+1 613-738-1338 ext 7268
[log in to unmask]
http://powerhouse.cognos.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Pickering, John (NORBORD) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: October 31, 2007 1:41 pm
To: Deskin, Bob
Subject: FW: [SPAM] - [HP3000-L] HP Makes Critical Patches Available for
Installation - Email found in subject

Bob

A response about the applicability of these patches to PowerHouse shops
from your good self or your able techies would be appreciated. Do the PH
components use "programmatic calls to HPSORTOUTPUT" and would they
therefore be affected by patch 1 below?

And both the PH list and 3000-l would probably like to see your answer.

Regards,
JWP

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Fairchild, Craig D
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 1:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SPAM] - [HP3000-L] HP Makes Critical Patches Available for
Installation - Email found in subject

Dear Hewlett Packard Customer,

We would like to advise you of a set of situations that Hewlett-Packard
has identified with MPE/iX software which, in very rare circumstances,
could lead to data corruption on HP e3000 systems running MPE/iX
Releases 6.5, 7.0, and 7.5. Hewlett-Packard has software patches for
these releases ready to correct these situations, MPENX11 and MILNX10,
available at the HP ITRC (http://itrc.hp.com/) or via your HP Support
Representative.  Though Hewlett-Packard believes very few, if any,
customers are at risk, HP strongly recommends that all customers take
the following corrective actions:

*       Install MPENX11 and MILNX10 at your earliest possible
convenience (see the patch descriptions below)
*       Your non-HP applications may be impacted: examine the
applications running on your systems to determine if they meet the
criteria to require a recompile (see the notes on patch MILNX10 below)
For those interested in more technical details further information is
available on the JAZZ web server: http://jazz.external.hp.com/milli

Patch MPENX11 addresses the following issues with MPE/iX:
1) SORT.PUB.SYS and programmatic calls to HPSORTOUTPUT: Customers on
MPE/iX Release 6.5, 7.0 or 7.5 who sort 4GB or more of data are at risk.
When either interface is used to sort more than 4 GB of data, the
returned record length could in rare instances be corrupted. If the
record length returned is less than it should be then data could be
lost.

2) MPE/iX OS millicode handling of long pointer access to large files:
When the OS copies data from a long pointer location only one byte from
a range is moved if, and only if that range starts six, five, four,
three or two bytes from the end of a four gigabyte space and the length
of the move transfers all remaining bytes of the space. No other source
address or transfer length combinations are affected nor are transfers
to such addresses.

Patch MILNX10 addresses potential issues with non-HP Software:
It is possible for non-HP Software to have an issue similar to the
MPE/iX OS millicode issue described above and thus be at risk of
corrupting data.  Addressing this issue may require that non-HP Software
be recompiled after installation of MILNX10.

Recompilation is not required for programs reading data exclusively
through MPE/iX File System intrinsics like FREAD, FREADDIR or HP
compiler library file access routines such as C/iX read(), Pascal/iX
read(), COBOL READ, as long as patch MPENX11is installed.  A recompile
may be required if customers and ISVs have written code to read data
from files larger than four gigabytes using Large Mapped pointers, AND
used move_fast or code statements that result in a call to
$$lr_unk_unk_long or $$lr_na_unk_long.  Then, as in the OS issue above,
if data is moved starting at locations six or fewer bytes from the end
of a four gigabyte boundary, millicode could silently move less than the
requested amount of data.  HP recommends that customers and ISVs rebuild
any applications which read data from large files via long pointers to
include the new version of the $$lr_unk_unk_long and $$lr_na_unk_long
routines via the new MILLI.LIB.SYS delivered in MILNX10.

If you have questions or require help, please contact your local HP
support representative or sales office.  We appreciate your business and
look forward to serving your future computing needs.

Regards,
Hewlett-Packard Company

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