1. UNIX /OSS is much older being built in 1970 and Guardian used many of the UNIX concepts in its construction, plus many more very modern ones.
    
2. The Windows series was based on the DOS OS, which was very quick and dirty and have many similarities with the PDP8 OS which was created in the 60's. The fact that the latest Windows OS's use preemptive multitasking and are compatible with mulitcores systems seems to have been done by using functionality add ons rather than a rebuild from basic principles as resulted in this OS being huge, unwieldy and cranky. The x86 platform, which is primeval at its heart also does not help.
    
3. The base of CICS and all the subsequent IBM OS's were conceived in the 50's and 60's.
    
4. Finally MacOS is modern being conceived in the late 70's and 80's using a decent processor, but I do not think that this was the basis of the contributors' comments.
    

February 17th, 2011

BITUG SIG

At the start of December last year there was the BITUG BIG SIG in Trinity House. It was the time of the big freeze and so many people who intended to attend were unable to do so. However, this did not stop many of HP leading lights in the NonStop arena keeping their promises to attend, including Bob  Kossler, who I had a chance to chat with about our products and the problems in demonstrating any NonStop products, since it is virtually impossible to set up a demonstration system on any temporary site and on demand communication to NonStop systems is fraught with difficulty.

As a result of this it occurred to me that for demonstration purposes these difficulties could be got over if a simple interactive replay program could be written to give the impression of a NonStop session and I pencilled out a few ideas on the spot. For instance such a program would have to have two modes and input mode, where the replay file was displayed character by character on the screen, and a display mode in which the replay file was simply displayed on the screen without interaction. Also to give realism and to go over what had previously been output the program had to be sensitive to Page Up and Down when in the input mode.

As a result of this I developed the Tandem Replay product for demonstration purposes and because time was short, the initial version runs under MS-DOS on a 24 bit screen, which means that it is useable up to Windows XP, and I gave it a 1000 line paging buffer, which appears to about right for any demonstration purpose. The Input file is captured from the session stripped of all special characters and STX (0x1) Inserted after prompts when input mode is required and ETX (0x3) Inserted after the input has completed, immediately before the response to be output. The program naturally terminates on the end  of the input file or receiving an EOF (Ctrl C) from the keyboard.

I used this at the next SIG to demonstrate the changes which had been made in FINFO on the  16th February 2011 to the Operations Management and Systems Management SIG at 88 Wood Street in London which was kindly hosted by HP and ably managed by Ian Liston-Brown from HP and Neil Barnes and Matt Whiteman from BITUG. It appeared to be well received but there was a problem with the overhead projector setup, when I tried to enter full screen DOS mode. Thus I had to use the command prompt windows mode which looked a little tacky, but never mind.

However, if you would like to look at this demonstration again please download the replay and the capture file, start a command prompt screen and enter

 REPLAY BITUGFEB.TXT

You can then step through the demonstration by pressing any key, using Page Up and Page  Down keys for paging through the displayed text. You can exit at any time by pressing Ctrl C. The capture program will work until 28th February 2011 and you can also use it to replay your own captured files, annotated as described above.

October 6th, 2010

FINFO 3.4

There are times when a product seems to come alive and take a direction of its own.

Such is the case with FINFO. I remember only to well standing up before BITUG and saying that the natural course of things is data produces information which then produces action. Never, realising the events which would unfold this year.

There have been several conversations this Autumn about using the information to be gained from FINFO to steer NonStop systems and it appeared useful to prototype these ideas before committing them using a SPI interface into the various system programs within the NonStop architecture.

This task has been made much easier by the fact that every utility on the NonStop platform has both a command line and a SPI interface and the command line interface always has an obey file capability.

Thus it is possibility to produce obey files to configure the system from FINFO by means of a fairly simple change and also then using this functionality to prototype the corresponding SPI functionality for a whole range of NonStop system applications, more about this later.

The second hurdle which needed to be crossed was to adequately answer the question of whether the file selection parameters within FINFO were adequate for this task?

Having taken advice the answer to this question was a conditional YES except I have not allowed for negative conditions i.e not safeguard, not file codes...

Having taken this step, for completeness, I also gave the file sort command -O the capability of reverse sorting.

The changes were implemented as follows:

1. All the selection parameters can now be accompanied by a not (!) condition
   So whereas -SG means select safeguard files -!SG or -S!G, means select all files not safeguard protected.
   This was included because, if you want to have control over the files selected it is really necessary to have the ability
   to select files over the whole range for instance -!sc100 -!sc500 -!sc700 all on the command line will result in the selection
   of all files except program object files, i.e. data files
    
2. All the print order parameters can now be accompanied by the not (!) condition -> reverse order
   So whereas -OD means display in ascending date order -!OD means display in descending date order
    
3. A new display type -C(ommand) has been included, this has the format:
   -Cpnt where p = position B(efore) or A(fter), n = line number from 1 - 20 must be sequential ascending
   t is the text in quotes "text", this can be anything, and if a quote is needed in the text a double quote is used ""

In conclusion this is good but it will get better with the the SPI interface(s), round trip engineering and the GUI interface to go. Life is getting exciting!

So, request a test licence for FINFO Version 3.4 (S-Series) or 5.1 (Itanium & CISC), available now.

September 21st, 2010

SafeGuard Futures

Our article in August's Tandem World was very well received with a huge number of readers, Thank You.

We also receive some very valuable and interesting feedback the gist of which was that it was not just the determination of how the system was protected by SAFEGUARD, but also how to set up SAFEGUARD on a database.

The general moan seemed to be even with the most recent point and click interfaces and the inclusion of DISKFILE-PATTERNS in the SAFECOM  and SPI interfaces the job of protecting a system using SAFEGUARD was very messy and did not really represent the way in which most system managers think.

The problem can be likened to trying to paint a picture and rather than having broad brushes to spread many different types of paint on over the broad range of the canvass one is limited to having a small brush which can paint only one pixel at a time and a paint a square tool.

The kernel of the matter lies in the low level nature of the SAFEGUARD descriptive language whether expressed directly or in the form of point and click favoured by many GUI interfaces which are all constrained by the problems of granting or denying access to a file to a given user under a given set of conditions. The is also the matter that the SAFEGUARD and Guardian environments are seen as distinct whereas in reality at the file system level they are tightly integrated.

What is really needed is a high level descriptive language where once could say for instance:

FOR ALL SQL FILES DISKS CALLED name_pattern_list
EXCEPT WHEN ALREADY SAFEGUARD PROTECTED OR
BELONGING TO USERS user_pattern_list OR
LAST ACCESSED time WEEKS AGO
DENY ACCESS TO ALL USERS EXCEPT user_pattern_list AND
GRANT ACCESS TO user_acl_list

Or
GUARDIAN PROTECT USING rwep

Or something like that and then having an engine which could compile this into the corresponding SAFEGAURD commands. It would also be even more revolutionary to have a decompiler which could look at a system and generate a description of the SAFEGUARD status of the system from what it found:

ALL DISKS NOT SAFEGUARD PROTECTED
EXCEPT pattern FILES ON DISKS CALLED name_pattern_list
BELONGING TO user_pattern_list AND
LAST ACCESSED WITHIN time WEEKS AGO
ACCESS DENIED TO ALL USERS EXCEPT user_pattern_list AND
ACCESS GRANTED TO user_acl_list

The terms round trip engineering and object modelling spring immediately to mind with the quantum leap which always accompanies the transition from purely context free declarative and imperative languages into context dependant natural languages of which our own is an example.

It also has the property of combining the GUARDIAN and SAFEGUARD environments at the top level of expression.

We are working with our partners to further this idea and decide what is required for it to be a success. Your ideas too would be more than welcome.

In the meanwhile you will simply have to manage with the existing facilities which are contained your favourite package or in our current version of FINFO as shown by last month’s white paper.

August 18th, 2010

FINF0 Version 3.3 Enabled for SafeGuard File Reporting (now available)

After considerable consultation and much work the FINFO Version 3.3 is now available.

The chief change from earlier development versions are:

1. Global SAFEGUARD settings are now displayed
    

2. SAFEGUARD Audit Service and Pool information is displayed 
    

3. The selection of File, SubVolume and Volume SAFEGUARD information has now been made sensitive to the Global settings, and also context dependent information is displayed.
   For instance if access to a diskfile requires clearance from both the the  DiskFile's and Subvolume's SAFEGUARD object records. This is stated in the DiskFile Display.

This has now been done (and tested!) and so the whitepaper has been updated with the changes, so if you want to see what has changed you will need to download it again.

I have also updated the User Manual with the changes and it is now available for download.

Postscript (19 Aug 2010): TANDEM WORLD managed to mangle our article: It should have looked like:

Ross Systems International SAFEGUARD™ Reporting

Ross Systems International, have added comprehensive SAFEGUARD^TM reporting to their disk file reporting package and have produced a White Paper giving details of the new functionality.

Title:        Reporting HP NonStop (Tandem) SAFEGUARD^TM Protected Disk Files Using FINFO

Subject:    HP NONSTOP;        FILE SYSTEM;        SAFEGUARD;        SECURITY;       

Author:     Rupert Stanley, Ross Systems International

Date:        8^th August 2010

Audience:  SECURITY MANAGERS AND SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS

Status:      VERY URGENT

Abstract:   SAFEGUARD is an HP NonStop (Tandem) proprietary product which is used to provide an extra layer of security to HP NonStop objects, such as Users, Processes, Devices and Disk Files.

SAFEGUARD protects Disk Files at the Volume, SubVolume and File Name Level by using a combination of:

1.    Access Control Lists, which contain information as to whether permission to access the objects is to be granted or denied based on user (group, number) and operation (read, write…).

2.    File Transaction Auditing Conditions, based on type (Access / Management), Outcome (Success or Failure) and Source (None, Local, Remote or All).

3.    File Status Information. i.e. whether the file is Licensed, ProgId’d, to be Cleared on Purge of if it is Persistent

This facility is very important is securing sensitive systems, particularly in the financial service industries, where there is a statutory obligation, and it provides a very competent facility for meeting these obligations.

Although the Auditing facilities are excellent there are several operational challenges in the status reporting mechanism which extensions to the RSI file information product FINFO address.

This white paper addresses these problems and shows how they are solved by FINFO Version 3.3.

Download:          WHITE PAPER

Product:             FINFO Version 3.3

Availability:        Now.

Trial:                30 day trial license available on request.

Email:               Rupert Stanley, rupert@rsi-ns.com

Telephone:        +44-1206-392923

Web:                http://www.rsi-ns.com/.

August 9th, 2010

FINF0 Version 3.3 Enabled for SafeGuard File Reporting (the continuing SAGA)

Overnight my helpful readers suggested that I should put the global SAFEGUARD settings into FINFO.

This has now been done (and tested!) and so the whitepaper has been updated with the changes, so if you want to see what has changed you will need to upload it again.

August 8th, 2010

FINF0 Version 3.3 Enabled for SafeGuard File Reporting

As I said in my last report work has been progressing apace on the safeguard reporting functionality, all the design and programming work has been done an the new version is in the last throes of testing and documentation..

It is also a very important release because it addresses several of the problems which are encountered when using SAFECOM to access information for reporting on SAFEGUARD protected files.

The new functionality addresses the requirements for a decent and intuitive on screen reporting package as well as the need to export SAFEGUARD data onto the PC platform for further processing by Excel or Access.

The chief strength of the product lies in it being able to be aware of all the various layers of disk file protection afforded by the linked objects and ACLs  and produce report data which expresses these links, which are so important in securing the HP NonStop Data Store.

It is also very convenient to be able to select SAFEGUARD protected by that attribute alone.

The features of this new version of FINFO are summarised in a downloadable whitepaper.

I look forward to your comments and also it available on 30 day trial on application.

June 25th, 2010

BITUG Presentation Follow Up / The Other Half

It is strange how when you set off in one direction you are often waylaid by events and finfish up by going in completely the opposite direction.

It was thus with the BITUG presentation of 25th May, whereas I have written up in quite considerable detail the FINFO component. It is however the HSM management element of the presentation which is receiving most interest.

This is not really surprising however, since HSMs are expensive beasts, about £50,000 a pop, and together with their maintenance costs at between 20 and 25% per annum, i.e. £10,000 each, consume considerable sums of money.

Add onto this the costs of the HSM drivers, which I have had intelligence of as costing about £100,000 per annum for an institution running a ATM and/or POS payments package.

Thus a big financial institution will probably have about 7 HSMs for which the costs look like:

This means that the setup price is £350,000 plus, especial if the driver software needs modification, and

The annual maintenance costs, excluding staff is of the order of £170,000 per annum and

These costs are very much dependant on the number of HSMs used and do not include staffing or other costs.

No wonder that there is great interest in anything which can bring this enormous cost of ownership down.

However in order to do this and to provide the service which financial institutions are legally and commercially required to they need to know the processing capacity of their HSMs in real terms for their transaction mix and load, and the only way of doing this is to be able to monitor transaction speeds from HSMs in the running application.

This is something which the existing HSM drivers are unable to do and which is already present in a simple form in our existing products and for which it is a fairly simple task to RPQ up to provide full reporting either in the form of extractable periodic reports on on-demand periodic load analysis.

The possible solutions are included in the discussion document which should be read in the context of our white paper on HSM Farms.

FINFO

Finally, the work on incorporating Safeguard information into FINFO is progressing apace with the writing of the SAFEGUARD SPI interface and has reached the point where the output looks like:

$WORK NATIVE 4> finfo -g

FINFO V2.8  Native 24/06/2010 18:53

-----

Copyright Ross Systems International Ltd. 2008

In House Version(Release Date 5th January 2009, Never Expires

Files on \SIRIUS.$WORK.NATIVE                        Audit

                                   Safeguard    Access   Manage

Name     Last Modified        Size Status LCPC PassFail PassFail Owner   RWEP

ZZVS00T  15-Oct-2009 11:13  57,344 Thawed YNYN ALL REM  LOC ALL  127,001 ****

                                   Access Control List  Owner    127,004 RWEP

                                                                 127,005 R E

                                                                 127,006 DENY E

ZZVS00X  14-May-2010 12:13  14,336 None                          127,001 NONO

ZZVS00Z  24-May-2010 12:39  14,336 Thawed YNYN ALL REM  LOC ALL  127,001 ****

Selected User Totals for SubVolume \SIRIUS.$WORK.NATIVE

User No  User Name            Files            Bytes Used      Pages Used

127,001  RSI.RUPERT              54             4,436,464           2,578

Totals:                          54             4,436,464           2,578

Watch this space, I still have the subvolume and volume analysis to do!

May 25th, 2010

BITUG Presentation

On 19th May I was invited to give a presentation of our Systems Management and performance tools.

As a result of which I decided that presentations of our FINFO and HSM Farming solutions would be of interest to the attendees, for a half hour slot this was a challenge.

BITUG as its name suggests is a Tandem User Group, which in reality means system managers, with a very thin sprinkling of business users and system developers. This means that any presentation must be focused on their perspective and requirements. A somewhat difficult task for a dyed in the wool developer like myself.

So, I planned to approach the presentation with the general plan of:

        DATA    →    INFORMATION     →    ACTION

and started to write the presentation on this basis with nice slides to ram the point home.

However, as they say there's many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip and as it so happened I had a very urgent non-moveable appointment sprung on me for the 18th. Oh how history repeats itself.

The end result of this was that the message got slightly mixed, since I was still in preparation at 5 a.m. on the morning of the presentation and had to hurry. Also maybe it would have been a good idea just to have dropped the HSEMM component, but there is always a temptation to get as much in as possible, which is not a good idea,.

I now know that the message should have been:

FINFO        TAKES THE DISK FILE  DATA

EXTRACTS THE INFORMATION YOU REQUIRE AND

ADVISES YOU ON THE ACTION TO TAKE

What could be simpler? I should also not have muddied the waters with information about HSM farms, which although is very useful information for system managers is a whole one hour session on its own.

At the end the chief comment made was that FINFO is a good tool because:

It contains virtually all of the functionality which system manages and developers need to supply them with the information they need for file maintenance and discovery, rather than the combination of FUP, DSAP etc,  and

It contains some information functions which are unavailable in any other product.  and

They loved the EXCEL spreadsheet export format

The audience would also like to see SAFEGUARD information added and look forward to seeing the GUI client version to bring it up to standard data-centre presentation standards. Work which is now in progress.

The comment was also made that the product is a dream ticket for developers because it would make life so much simpler for them and save them huge quantities of time and money with its advanced file search and display facilities, but I needed to get to that audience, and

Finally I did not mention that the first of our clients using the product were saving considerable amounts of money in the systems management group compared to tying to do the tasks assigned using TACL macros, as they previously had done.

Anyway, I hope if you attended you enjoyed it and if you did not then you can download the notes from our web site. download.

Thank you for listening and for your useful advice. If you would like to try a full function demo version please contact me rupert@rsi-ns.com

FINFO

In the meanwhile FINFO has been in an extended Beta phase.

I have given it more functionality in that it now gives a detailed set of recommendations for action after the sub-volume summary display.

I have also fixed a couple of bugs which our user base have found, as usual it is always in the most abstruse parts of the functionality that the bugs are uncovered. I suppose that the more a section of the code is exposed to the user base the more likely it is that problems will become apparent when it is used.

There was also the fact that the multi-threaded server needed to be built and tested, which took some time.

I am also still working on the Java client server and will try to also include the comments made at BITUG concerning the incorporation of SAFEGUARD functionality.

So, all is going ahead but somewhat slowly.

April 5th, 2010

Site Errors

I have just been informed of a number of missing links in our site.

The problem with the index page has now been resolved and the probe link below now works.

Sorry folks.

March 29th, 2010

FINFO 3.2

At the current moment I am in the process of developing a SPI version of FINFO with a corresponding TCP/IP interface and JAVA front end and am now testing the Tandem components whilst at the same time building the Java components.

As a result of this I have been made aware of the fact that the Java components need to navigate through the Tandem volume/subvolume/file hierarchy, a facility which is at present not available in the stand alone versions of FINFO. So there was a need to go back to the drawing board to include this capability and since I want to make the product consistent, it was therefore necessary to include this in the base line versions.

I considered the best way of including this within the structure of the FINFO command set and I came up with the conclusion that it would be best to be able to type in:

FINFO $<vol> to get the volume information, wherr <vol> could be wildcarded, and

FINFO $<vol>.<sub> to get the subvolume information where both <vol> and <sub> can be wildcarded

The question was then how was the information to be displayed and I came to the conclusion that for the volumes display, it would be a good idea to follow the DSAP ,SHORT format as follows:

>FINFO $*

\sirius.$work.native.licenses
FINFO V3.2  Native 26/03/2010 16:07
-----
Copyright Ross Systems International Ltd. 2008,2009,2010
 
Full Version (Release Date 18th March 2010)
-------------------------------------------
VOLUMES on \SIRIUS
              (Mb)          (Mb)        %           Fragments
Volume      Capacity     Free Space   Free      Count      Biggest(Mb)
$SYSTEM         2000         267.91     13        140       267.03
$AUDIT          4238        1595.34     37          7       625.50
$WORK           4238        3586.97     84         27      2826.38
Totals         10476        5450.22     52        174      2826.38
 

Note the inclusion of system totals

However, subvolume display offered a possibility to perform an unique analysis of disk usage which was far more valuable than the straight listing afforded by FUP including an analysis of what percentage of the disk space was being used by the various subvolumes and if any files were at their limit, identifying where they were situated:

Note. The subvolumes where there are files at their limit are identified and the amount of the disk estate consumed by each subvolume is identified together with the number of users of the disk. The system total for the subvolumes analysed is also included, including an average usage across the entire disk estate. Thus converting a simple information tool into a hot tool for system space usage analysis, something which to my knowledge is not available elsewhere.

The development of FINFO will continue with the Java front end and SPI server. However, in the future the price of the product, which will include this functionality, will reflect the added capabilities.

However, if you become a registered used before the Java front end functionality is released you will receive upgrades at no additional cost, including the Java front end release, and the future pricing of the product licenses for your systems will only reflect the small annual increase for the non Java version, in spite of your receiving all future upgrades including the Java releases.

To order go to the FINFO Order Page