Recent News and Tips

Robelle Sales and Admin and Research and Development offices will be closed on Good Friday, Friday March 21, 2008. Support will be available on Good Friday. Both Sales/Admin and R and D return and are open on Monday, March 24, 2008.

3/20/2008

Remove Trailing Spaces (HP-UX)

Here is a way to remove trailing spaces using pr on HP-UX.

pr -t INFILE >INFILE.spaces

3/11/2008

Comparing Two Groups of Files

I have a need to compare all the files in two Groups of MPE files.

Two Groups of Files Comparison

3/07/2008

Suprtool 5.0.13 Pre-Release

Suprtool 5.0.13 has just been released.

What's New in Suprtool?

3/06/2008

How Do I create Random characters on HP-UX

I never knew that their was a $RANDOM variable.

Generate Three Random Characters?

3/06/2008

How Do I Fix Floating Exception Abort

Follow the link in order to solve the problem of Floating Exception core in Suprtool for HP-UX.

Handle Floating Exception?

3/04/2008

How Do I Import Data

We have started a new column called How Do I? The first article is a question we've been asked lately and that is How Do I Import Data using Suprtool?

Import Data Using Suprtool?

3/03/2008

Presidents/Family Day

Robelle will be closed February 18th, 2008. Support is available, but for emergencies only.

2/15/2008

Support on Martin Luther King Day

There will be e-mail support on MLK day, however, phone in support will not be available. E-mail support will be from 8am EST until 4pm EST and resume again from 6pm EST until 9pm.

1/21/2008

Bonus products in .TXT form

We have older bonus product manuals that have not been converted to pdf, however with migrations going on, some people need to know what these older applications and libraries do, so we have posted the files in ".TXT" format in our library.

Bonus Products in .TXT format

12/21/2007

Robelle Support Holiday Hours

12/18/2007

Robelle Sales/Admin Office Holiday Hours

*Staff will be checking e-mail and voice mail from home.

12/17/2007

Robelle Closed November 22-23, 2007

Robelle Sales/Admin and Technical Support offices will be closed will be closed from Thursday, November 22, 2007 to Friday, November 23, 2007.

E-mail support will be available.

11/09/2007

In light of the information on data corruption on large files reads and sorts posted on HP-3000L by Craig Fairchild we thought it would be prudent to discuss the impact on Robelle products.

First and foremost none of our software needs to be recompiled in order to to utilize the new move_fast or milli_code routines.

Suprtool and Qedit do call HPSORTOUTPUT. Qedit does this by default and Suprtool calls HPSORTOUTPUT if you have:

>Set SortFast Off

The default is on, so by default Suprtool will not encounter the HPSORTOUTPUT bug when sorting unless you have set sortfast off.

Qedit does call HPSORTOUTPUT, however, experience has shown us that not many users use the LSORT command.

So to summarize, none of our products need to be re-compiled and you may want to install the HPSORTOUTPUT patch if you have Set SortFast Off in Suprtool or sort files using LSORT command in Qedit.

Below is a copy of the announcement from Craig Fairchild on HP3000-L

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.

11/01/2007

We have released a new pre-release version of Suprtool which has some bug fixes and a couple of new enhancements.

Highlights in Version 5.0.10

MPE

• Suprtool now reads NM KSAM files with MR NOBUF if an IF command is specified.
• STExport XML command did not convert compound items (2)..(n) properly.
• Multiple literal compares now work in the if command
• If $lookup can now return the data portion loaded into a table to use in a comparison.
• STExport HTML command did not calculate the maximum record size properly in some cases.

• STExport XML command did not convert compound items (2)..(n) properly.
• Multiple literal compares now work in the if command.
• If $lookup can now return the data portion loaded into a table to use in a comparison.
• Suprtool for HP-UX would fail with a DBGET failure on a directed read if fastread was on and if the record number specified did not have a record in the slot previous to the start record number.
• Suprtool2 would fail to detect the ROBSUPR variable even if set in some cases. (AMXW only)

10/04/2007

Robelle Closed Monday October 8, 2007

Robelle Sales/Admin and Research and Development offices will be closed will be closed this Monday, October 8, 2007 for Canadian Thanksgiving.

Robelle Support will be available.

10/04/2007

Qedit 5.7.10 Pre-Release

• Regular Expressions. Qedit would improperly report the error "String longer than maximum allowed" if the expression specified is longer than the window of the rangelist. (HP-UX/MPE)
• Shadow Passwords. Qedit for HP-UX did not support Shadow Passwords properly for all versions of HP-UX.

9/25/2007

Archived News and Tips...

HP 3000 Book

Edited by Bob Green of Robelle, from articles written by Robelle, by The 3000 Newswire, and by other experts in the HP 3000 field.

This 300-page book contains the latest information on three important topics:
Homesteading
HP 3000 Tune Up
Migrating a 3000 application.