What's Up, DOCumentation? 2000 # 5

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November 2000

From: Technical Support

To: Users of Robelle Software

Re: News of the HP e3000 and of HP-UX, 2000 #5

What You Will Find in This Newsletter:

MPE/iX 5.5 Support Ends Dec 31, 2000
Which HP e3000 CPUs Support More Memory?
Make Your Suprtool Listings Distinct
Qedit for Windows Script Simplifies Checking an MPE Job
Use Reflection's Font with Qedit for Windows
What's New in Qedit 5.0

MPE/iX 5.5 Support Ends Dec 31, 2000

According the HP Response Centre, support for MPE/iX 5.5 will end on December 31, 2000.

If you are upgrading to MPE/iX 6.0 or 6.5, here are the versions of Robelle products that you need:

For MPE/iX 6.0: Qedit 4.6.02 or higher, Suprtool 4.1.04 or higher

For MPE/iX 6.5: Qedit 4.8.01 or higher, Suprtool 4.3 or higher

Which HP e3000 CPUs Support More Memory?

Editor's Note: The following excerpt was taken from HP3000-L May 31, 2000. It was posted by Dave Snow of Hewlett-Packard.

With the March 2000 shipment of MPE/iX Release 6.5, some HP e3000 servers now support more than 3.75 GB of main memory. This is good news for many applications for which memory sizes limited the number of users that could be supported or for which the application's performance was limited by the 3.75 GB maximum memory size.

Only HP e3000 servers that use the PA8000 or PA8200 processor chips (the PA-RISC 64 bit chips) with MPE/iX Release 6.5 will be able to use memory sizes greater than 3.75 GB. This includes a number of 9x9KS servers (the 929KS/030, 939KS/030, 979KS, 989KS/x00 and 989KS/x50 servers) and the 997 servers.

For those HP e3000 9x9KS servers that do support more than 3.75 GB of memory, the upper limit is now 8 GB; for the HP e3000 997 servers, the upper limit is now 16 GB with MPE/iX Release 6.5.

Make Your Suprtool Listings Distinct

If you have multiple Suprtool listings that get sent to a printer, it is sometimes hard for your operations staff to differentiate between them, because they are all called SUPRLIST.

   >:showout

   DEV/CL DFID    JOBNUM  FNAME     STATE FRM SPACE RANK PRI #C
   LASER  #O25486 #S2806  SUPRLIST  READY        16    D   1  1
   LASER  #O25487 #S2806  SUPRLIST  READY        16    D   1  1
   LASER  #O25488 #S2806  SUPRLIST  READY        16    D   1  1
   33     #O33    #S2806  $STDLIST  OPENED

One easy way to make each listing distinct is to include a different file equation between each task. For example,

   >file suprlist=rept100
   >get d-sales
   >list standard device laser
   >xeq
   >file suprlist=rept200
   >get m-customer
   >list standard device laser
   >xeq

   >:showout

   DEV/CL DFID    JOBNUM  FNAME     STATE FRM SPACE RANK PRI #C
   LASER  #O25488 #S2806  REPT100   READY        16    D   1  1
   LASER  #O25489 #S2806  REPT200   READY        16    D   1  1
   33     #O33    #S2806  $STDLIST  OPENED

[Paul Gobes]

Qedit for Windows Script Simplifies Checking an MPE Job

We recently changed our e-mail clients to a PC-based program, even though we still use our MPE-based system to monitor automated jobs. The problem is that now nobody notices when the MPE-based e-mail system is not running.

So I devised a scheduled task on our NT server that uses QSL, the new Qedit scripting language, to create a file with the output of a :Showjob command and e-mail it to the system manager.

This QSL task is very simple:

   Name Mailtest;

   mpeCmd = "showjob job=mailjob,mgr.xpress";
   outfile = newfile();

   mpeConn = openconnection(connection: "hobbes - sysmgr");
   hostCmdResult = hostcommand(connection: mpeConn,
   command: mpeCmd, output: outfile);

   outfile.saveas( filename: "\\nitro\c\operations\log\mailtest.log",
   forceoverwrite: true);
   outfile.close();
   exit();

The MPE command is defined; the connection is established. When the command is performed, the output is returned to a new file that is then saved on the NT server. The script then stops running Qedit for Windows.

The actual .bat file that is scheduled on the NT server looks like this:

   if exist c:\operations\log\mailtest.log del c:\operations\log\mailtest.log
   C:\ROBELLE\QEDIT\qwin32.exe -r c:\scripts\mailtest.qsl
   mailfile nitro sysmgr "Mailjob summary" c:\operations\log\mailtest.log

Qedit for Windows is used to run only the QSL script, then the Mailfile program e-mails the resulting file to the system manager. The Mailfile program is a WinBatch script.

This approach could be used to monitor HP-UX system tasks just as easily.

[Paul Gobes]

Use Reflection's Font with Qedit for Windows

If you have WRQ's Reflection, you can use WRQ's r_ansi font as Qedit for Windows' default font. The advantage is, in addition to having a much nicer display font, you can also see control characters in a much more meaningful way. To change the default Display Font, go to the Options - Preferences - Defaults.

With the r_ansi font, the Escape Character shows up as as a single-character EC on the screen.

[Dave Lo]

What's New in Qedit 5.0

The Qedit 5.0 update is coming soon! North American users with a current support contract should receive their update package towards the end of November, while International users will get theirs in the first quarter of 2001.

Here is a peek at some of the new enhancements. You can get more detailed information from www.robelle.com/support/changes.html

Powerful New Editing Capabilities

* You can now specify non-printing characters in regular expressions by using \xDDD.

* You can now save your REDO stack from one session to the next using the Set Redo command.

Enhanced Interaction with Operating System

* The ROBMSGFENCE variable can suppress warning or error messages when executing MPE commands and command files. Possible values are 0, 1 or 2 and work the same as HPMSGFENCE in MPE.

* The new "Set Keep Limit nnn" option allows you to control the size of the file created by a Keep command.

More Cut-and-Paste Options in Full-Screen Mode

* "HJ" to mark a block to be appended to the Hold file.

* "JJ" marks a block of text to justify.

* "RR" and "Rn" replicates a block of text up to 9 times.

* Set Visual Cutcurrent controls the location of the current line after a cut-and-paste operation in full-screen mode. When set to On, the current line is the beginning of the pasted text. When set to Off, Qedit tries to keep the current line as close as possible to the line position before the paste operation.

New Listing Features

* Use the $columns option on the List command to display or print only certain columns in the file. Up to four column ranges can be selected. For example,

   list $columns (10/15 1/4)

* Use the $rightby option on the List command to shift text right by a specified number of columns on printed output.

Even Better Performance

* Qedit/iX 5.0 uses mapped access and dynamic indexing to dramatically improve the performance of browsing on spool files, variable-length files, and bytestream files (i.e., ListJumping Last-200, searching backwards to strings in ListJumping, etc.).

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