A few days ago Jon Diercks asked:

> > Who would be the best person to contact at HP to pound in
> the affirmation that customers *do* want SSL on MPE?  I have
> delayed deployment of a major application in hopes ......

After which Rick jumped in:

> What he said!  Double!

> Come to SIGWeb at IPROF.  Help me pound it into them.  My
> banking application customers (all financial institutions) are
> basically on hold, waiting for an SSL server on the 3000 and
> don't want yet another box they have to support (like NT).

As I think was already mentioned by Ron Seybold, the person
to direct all harangues to in this case is Ozlem Ozturk (at least
this week;  HP product and marketing managers change so
often I have more-or-less given up trying to keep track of them
long-term...   ;-) ).

I gather she will be at IPROF, because she is on the attendee
list for the pre-IPROF Java user meeting at 18:00 Wed 17 Feb
over at the Hilton Garden Inn (Have I plugged the IMAGE and
JAVA meetings on the 17th already today ??... oh, well:  I'll just
have to live with the guilt.....).

This is a classic "chicken and the egg" case;  or some variation
thereof.  At least so far HP seems to be saying:

"Gee, the people who absolutely have to have SSL seem to
doing that by using other platforms to perform that function in
conjunction with their 3000's"..   duh !!!.:   As a representative
of yet another site that has experienced some of the joys of
depending on external NT boxes for DNS, WINS, and web
services for our production client-server system that uses TurboIMAGE on the
back end, I would respectfully but forcefully
suggest that since they don't have any other choice right now,
any extrapolation that concludes SSL on the 3000 is not needed
is clearly flawed (if there is anyone still seriously asking that
question;  I hope there isn't...).

Even if those other boxes are up most of the time, unless there
is some reason that a site *has* to run multiple platforms, I think
that both in principal and in practice it is pretty clearly more cost,
time, and complexity-efficient to run all server components of a
mission critical system on ONE box (with a NetBase / SharePlex
backup if 99.99999 or whatever percent uptime is absolutely
required).


BOTTOM LINE:  If the 3000 can't do SSL, in many if not most
cases it won't be considered for use as a serious production
web server in the commercial world.   See again the above by
Rick and Jon.

QUESTION:  Can an AS/400 be an SSL-capable web server
without the "other platform" crutch ?  Believe I know the answer.

QUESTION:  Should the 3000 be able to support SSL ??..
....  Answer should be self-evident, IMO...  It is one of the key
remaining missing pieces;  after Apache/iX, Bind/iX, Syslog/iX,
Samba/iX, etc... (thank you HP....  probably even bigger thank
you to Mark Bixby and Lars Appel...  oops..:  Lars is HP...  :-)  ).

Ken Sletten