Beechglen Development Inc.

Beechglen Development Inc.
3862 Race Road - Cincinnati, Ohio 45211 - (513) 922-0509 - Fax (513) 347-2834

Some Useful Free Utilities for MPE

I thought I would share with you various useful shareware utilities that are available for the HP 3000. In the past these utilities would only be available from the Interex Contributed Software Library. More often than not, the authors are now making these available via the Internet and I look for this trend to continue in the future.

TAPECOPY: A utility to duplicate one tape (reel-to -reel, DDS, or DLT) to another including SLTs and NMSTORE tapes. Previously, only a program that understood the intricacies of the NMSTORE format could copy STORE tapes. This handy utility can copy directly from tape-to-tape, tape-to-disk, or disk-to-tape. One use for this utility is duplicating backup tapes without performing a second backup. Another good use, provided you have enough disk space, is method for validating backup tapes.

One of the features of the TurboStore 7x24 Online product from Hewlett Packard is the ability to create a store archive on disk in place of storing to tape, provided you have enough disk space. Such files are created with a filecode of "STORE". TAPECOPY will create one of these disk files when you copy from tape-to-disk enabling you to create online archives that can easily be accessed with the RESTORE command. You can obtain TAPECOPY from http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/misc/tapecopy.tar

SLEEPER has been a popular job scheduler for the HP 3000 for many years. This version can stream jobs, execute commands, and run programs. Tasks can be one-time only or can be repetitive. Sleeper contains comprehensive scheduling features for hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. This version of Sleeper is also Year 2000 Compliant according to the latest author, Paul H. Christidis (email: phchristidis@WEST.RAYTHEON.COM). You can obtain a copy of SLEEPER from the following URL: http://www.editcorp.com/editcorp/products /index.html

DBHTML is a utility that will decompile a database root file into an HTML document. This is a handy utility for walking the structure of a database with a web browser or just for documentation purposes. It can also generate a valid schema file for creating new databases with DBSCHEMA. You can obtain DBHTML here: http://www.allegro.com/software/stuff/DBHTML.LZW. There are several other handy utilities on the Allegro web site. It is definitely worth checking out.