Robelle staff wish you a Happy Holiday and all the best in 2006

What About Itanium?

Recently, we have had a lot of inquiries about our support of Itanium chips or the new Itanium2 (trademark) Integrity server machines. Many of the customers want to know just one thing: does it work or not, and is it supported.

Well, to be honest, this is IT in the 21st century, and there are rarely simple answers!

Qedit

We have tested much of the functionality of Qedit version 5.5.11 and higher, both the Windows client and the server, and the only issue encountered is already an issue on HP-UX 11.0.

In HP-UX 11.0, HP deprecated the "block mode" routines that we used at one time in visual mode. This prompted us to do the enhancement "Visual BlockEmulation", which has been in place for three years now. On Itanium, or more specifically, HP-UX version 11iV2 (11.23), HP has removed these routines altogether. Therefore when you attempt to go into visual mode without BlockEmulation On you will get an error: “Unresolved symbol: blopen”.  In order to avoid this problem, just put the command:

Set Vis BlockEmulation On

in your qeditmgr file.

Suprtool

Our usual testing has shown that Suprtool runs fine on Itanium, with the exception of using the Oracle interface.

On Itanium, you cannot mix PA_RISC programs and libraries with ELF (Native Itanium) libraries. Oracle, seems to only ship the ELF libraries with their Itanium version, which unfortunately causes Suprtool to give an error when it attempts to load the libraries.

Suprtool only attempts to load the libraries if you have a trial version or if you have this option enabled. If you do not require the Oracle option to be enabled, you should get a version without Oracle.

Click the link at the start of this article for full technical details on Oracle libraries and Suprtool/UX.

Eloquence does not have the same problem that Oracle does, as they have the wisdom to ship both the Itanium and the PA_RISC libraries.

A hint for determining if a library file is PA_RISC or ELF. You can use the file command on HP-UX. Often the difference is obvious, since PA_RISC libraries are often referred to as "shared libraries", whereas Itanium native "libraries" are often referred to as "shared objects":

file libclntsh.sl

libclntsh.sl:   PA-RISC1.1 shared library -not stripped

file libwtc9.sl

libwtc9.sl:     PA-RISC1.1 shared library -not stripped

/usr/lib/hpux64: file libm.so

libm.so:        ELF-64 shared object file - IA64

/usr/lib/hpux32: file liby.so

liby.so:        ELF-32 shared object file - IA64

To determine dependencies of libraries you can use the ldd command, although unfortunately ldd does not recognize PA_RISC 1.1 library files on Itanium, or more accurately, HP-UX 11.23 (commonly referred to as v2)

/ldd libclntsh.sl
ldd: Invalid file type: "libclntsh.sl". 
Shared executable or shared library expected.
ldd liby.so
libc.so.1 =>  
/usr/lib/hpux32/libc.so.1
libdl.so.1 =>
/usr/lib/hpux32/libdl.so.1<

Currently for the Suprtool2 or Suprcall interface we only have the PA_RISC version of suprtool2 available. Please e-mail Neil to discuss obtaining the ELF version of the Suprtool2 interface.

To determine the minimum version of our products that you need to be on for your version of HP-UX, please see this table.

Staying, Migrating and Surviving

New files in HP-UX!

Sometimes customers kick themselves for asking simple questions, but really there are no silly questions. I had to remind myself what I do when a customer asked about creating a new file on HP-UX.  - Neil

Migration page updated!

Recently we have been getting more e-mails about migrating Suprtool code from MPE to HP-UX. We went back and looked at our migration article and quickly realized that due to improvements made in Suprtool 4.9.01 a couple of the more recent features of Output=Input, and Totals to a $file and $list, had been completed, so migrations are just a little bit easier.

Click on the link above to read some of the details.

MPE Training Continues!

Paul Edwards and Frank Smith have licensed the MPE training courses from HP and are offering training into the future. As HP certified MPE professionals, Frank Alden Smith of Alden Research, Inc., and Paul Edwards of Paul Edwards & Associates were HP contract instructors for nearly a decade and are long time solution and training partners of HP. They will provide ongoing course material updates, creation of new courses, and delivery of high quality MPE training at specific training facilities or customer sites. Click link above for their web site.

How do I move my SD files to HP-UX?

SD files, or Self describing files are used widely on MPE. Self-describing files have mini-dictionaries that tell Suprtool what fields and data types are in any given file. On MPE this information is stored in the file labels, however, their is no concept of a file label (user) that we could store this information in, back when we ported Suprtool to HP-UX we stored this information in a separate file, which has the same name as the data portion, with a ".sd" appended to the file.

Lately we have been asked how to move Self-Describing files from MPE over to HP-UX. If you click on the link above, you will learn all about SDUNIX our conversion utility that takes SD files from MPE and turns them into the two files which can be read by Suprtool for HP-UX when copied over. You can read all about SDUNIX if you click on the link above.

Getting SD files off of tape?

We recently had an inquiry from a customer that no longer had an HP 3000 that needed to get their Self-Describing files off of tape and onto the HP 9000 as the two separate files, both data and "label" information.

Unfortunately, SDUNIX cannot read files off of tape, Allegro on the other hand, does have a solution.  Take a look at Gavin Scott's reply on options for getting SD files from an HP 3000 store tape (and other formats), to your HP 9000, in our recurring Technical Support web column.

New Consultant Listing: Robert Lewis

Located in Tampa, Robert has been specializing on HP 3000 systems since 1976. Support for networks, MS Office, Cobol, Basic, TurboImage, Adager, Suprtool, KSAM, WRQ Reflection, MPEX, Security/3000, Qedit, HTML. Email: rs.lewis@earthlink.net

Suprtool Tips

Adventures in Technical Support!

This feature was called the technical support call of the week, however, we have already had feedback saying that this is answering questions for our customers, and since we have a fairly large collection of support calls, this feature is now called Adventures in Technical Support.

Feel free to say Adventures in Technical Support like a over zealous small market radio announcer, driving in a convertable thru a tunnel.

On that note, take a look at our latest installment for creating Unique Filenames

My File is Empty - Help!

The basic premise is, the customer does a Suprtool extract and clearly sees that records were selected and written to a file. However, when they list the file with Qedit, or print the file via MPE, nothing shows up?

>get d-inventory

>out dinv,link

>exit

IN=7, OUT=7. CPU-Sec=1. Wall-Sec=1.

End Run

/list dinv

 Warning: No Line 

/:print dinv

Now, typically anytime anyone tries to list or print a file and they get the wrong file or information they were not expecting, we ask for two things:

listftemp,2

listeq

Usually, the empty file is due to an empty TEMPORARY file with the same name as the permanent one.

/listftemp,2

TEMPORARY FILES FOR MGR.TECHSUP,NEIL

ACCOUNT=  TECHSUP     GROUP=  NEIL    

FILENAME  CODE  ------------LOGICAL RECORD-----------  ----SPACE----

                  SIZE  TYP        EOF      LIMIT R/B  SECTORS #X MX

DINV      SD       38B  FA           0          0 107       16  1  1 (TEMP)

So if you get results you were not expecting, usually the answer is in the result of a listftemp,2 or listeq command.

Qedit Tips

Qedit and Columns

A customer e-mailed us to as they knew what they wanted to do, but they did not know what syntax to use for manipulating columns.

Read the article on how to move columns and change data in certain columns based on data in other columns.