D3-NT: The install is complete, now what?

This article is intended for those of you that have installed D3-NT, and have found the ability to Telnet into the VME and get a familiar Pick logon prompt. I will not go into the details of having to configure your adapter (network or dial-up) with both TCP/IP and NetBEUI. Nor the fact that you should enter (stand-alone only) a fake IP address (Control Panel>Network>(TCP/IP ->Dial-up Adapter (or whatever))>Properties>IP Address) by selecting the radial “Specify an IP address” and inputting something like 125.125.125.125 with the Subnet being 255.255.255.0. The default Microsoft selects when adding the TCP/IP protocol to your adapter is the radial “Obtain an IP address Automatically”, which requires even more setting up. Those of you who may have some kind of service provider for the Internet, may have the default selected with the “DNS configuration” enabled. The “Host” name should be the same name as your “Computer Name:” as shown in the Control Panel>Network>Identification section. To rid yourself of that nagging modem that keeps trying to fire up and call your service provider (because TCP/IP became active), when D3 is starting, disable the box “Use AutoDial” by selecting the Internet icon in the Control Panel. One last point before we cruise down TCL lane. Once D3-NT is installed on your system, it will automatically start up every time you restart your computer. To disable this feature for Windows NT systems, select the Service icon in the Control Panel, highlight the D3 entry, select Startup button and change from Automatic to Manual. Running WIN95, you will have to edit the system Registry (now you really have to pay attention). Do so by clicking Start>Programs>D3Utilities> Registry Editor. Once open, select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE >Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>RunServices . Now double click on RunServices and you will see a D3 entry. Select the entry and delete it. Close the Registry Editor. Now when you reboot WIN95, you will have to open an MS-DOS Prompt, log to your D3\D3programs directory and type 'd3vme /start' .. This will start the D3 service. If for some reason, your Telnet sessions got hosed (tech talk), and you want to stop the D3 service, you can type 'd3vme /stop' at the same prompt location and the service should stop. But enough of this boring stuff  you probably already know.

: TCL, cool…. I have a Telnet connection (using “localhost” as Host Name) into the middle of  Bill Gates' multi-tasking, multi-user Windows environment. Life is great.. I can create-account, create-file, edit items, sort, list and with some reading in the “D3 Books On Line” have figured out that ‘Ctrl \’ is now the break key. We are now in the “VME”. The Virtual Machine Environment. The typical install would give you a 32MB single file BLOB sitting on top of the Windows file system (disk0.d3v through Windows File Manager (Explorer)).. Doing a “:free” , you see about 17MB (8,485 2K frames) available. What’s this?? I need 4.7 Gig of disk just for my data, where am I going to store my 4,000 programs???? Well folks, there is more to D3-NT than just the traditional Pick compatible, multi-level, ASCII looking, 32 bit, multi-user, phantom running, legacy looking, TCL prompting VME.

Welcome to the FSI. The File System Interface. This folks, is the heart of the D3-NT product. If you found yourself with a slight drool playing with the VME, get the buckets out as we step into the FSI. I do not want to scare anybody off with the words VB or OLE and not to mention ODBC and SQL (we could go on), those subjects might be down the road for you now (next week maybe), and its not the intention of this article to cover them, but.. Within minutes, you can have your Pick data downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet, Word document, Forrest and Trees and the like. And you don’t even have to write a single line of code. Sorry, we weren’t supposed to go there, but I just can’t help myself. The FSI is where you want to store your Pick data. The reasons are numerous, but what the heck, I’ll mention just a few. If you're using Windows NT, then you have the robust NT file system to write your data to (compared to the BLOB in the VME), you have the extra security, the ability to put your data anywhere within the network, to have other applications use this data, and (my favorite) the pretty GUI icons that show your accounts, files and items. In the FSI, we refer to accounts as “Databases”, files are “Tables” and items are “Records”. See, that wasn’t so bad.

Storing your data in the FSI is not difficult. You must be activated with more than one user in order to be able to perform the next few steps. So, fire up your VME, start a Telnet session and log into the dm account of your VME. With that done, we will now go to the D3 Utilities program group (Start>Programs > )and click on “D3 File Manager”. This opens a program that allows us to manage our D3 data. Start by clicking on the ‘open folder’. This will open the Databases and show you what accounts are out there. Right click on the top (green barrel) icon that reads Databases. Click on “Create Database”. A Window pops up and waits for you to type in a Database (account) name; lets type in Rob, click on “Create”. Congratulations, you just created a database in the FSI. Now, click back to your Telnet session, from the dm account, type “update-md fsi:rob” and hit enter. The next few prompts should look familiar to you. Now at TCL type “to fsi:rob” and hit enter. Do a “who” and you will see you are ‘:1 dm fsi:rob’ … Too cool. Do we have your attention yet??? Try to keep the drool off  the keyboard - my number key-pad has never been the same since. Lets do a “:create-file data1 7 7”, now click back to the D3 File Manager, select View, Refresh, open the Rob account by clicking on the ‘+’ with the left mouse button. The first 'Tables' you see under Rob are the dictionary of the account/database Rob. Right click the Tables icon and select “Show Data”. On the right you are viewing the Item ID’s (attribute a0) of the verbs we copied over when we did an “update-md” from the VME (yes, this is definitely poetic). From the ribbon select View, Options, and change “Show Attributes” from 0 to 5. Right click on Tables again and select “Show Data”. You now see 5 attributes per record. You can double click any of the attributes a0 and be taken into an “Edit Record” screen. Now click on the ‘+’ of the dictionary, and you will see a smaller but similar Table. This is the Dict of the file data1 we created. Open that table and you will see a yellow folder, this is your data portion.

Now lets click back to the Telnet session (VME). We are going to need some data to play with. Log back to the dm account (:to dm) and type ‘:set-device’ enter. Select #2 (Pseudo 0) and hit enter. Type ‘:T-dump dm,messages,’ and hit enter. You’ll see 1686 items flash past the screen. This will be our play-around data. Type ‘:t-rew’ enter, (OK guys, no more of me, typing ‘enter’) type ‘:t-load fsi:rob,data1,’. With this complete, we can click back to the D3 File Manager, give it another Refresh, open our Table for data1, right click on the yellow folder and click on “Count File”, a window come up and show that you now have 1686 Item(s) in the file. You can drag and drop files between different accounts, edit your data, create files, all sorts of fun toys, play with it, get used to it, this is where you will store all your data. Lets go back to our Telnet session with the VME and do a ‘:t-det’. You may create as many Pseudo devices as needed for your various backups etc. and path them to any drive on any system in any directory you have access to. The VME will support any tape device your version of Windows will support. This holds true with printers and serial devices. Before we start to load your data into D3-NT, lets make some q-pointers in the VME to eliminate the need to type the 'fsi:rob' thing. First, from TCL in the dm account, type ‘:list fsi:rob,data1, you may hit ‘CTRL X’ to stop the output. Now to create a q-pointer  to an account in the FSI, type ‘:u only mds rob’. You should get prompted with a 01, so on the first attribute enter a ‘q’ and on the second line 02 enter ‘fsi:rob’, now file the q-pointer (CTRL X F). That got rid of the ‘fsi:’ prefix. So now you can type ‘list rob,data1,’ and get a list of your data. Let's create a q-pointer to the file data1. From dm type ‘:u md data1’ , on line 01 enter ‘q’ on line 02 you leave blank, and on line 03, enter ‘fsi:rob,data1,’ and file it. Now from the dm account you can type ‘:list data1’ and get the same results as typing ‘:list fsi:rob,data1,’ … From the VME, you can create Super Q-pointers that will point to different networked systems that may be running SCO or UNIX. Good stuff.

Let's load your accounts through the VME into the FSI. The first thing we have to do is break a Pick rule, we must create the account (it will be called Database from now on) in the FSI using the D3 File Manager BEFORE we restore our data into it. Follow the steps above to do that. All ¼ SCT tapes are compatible from your other AP backups. Do a little reading in the D3 Books On Line to configure your tape drive in the Windows Registry (I am not going to walk you through that unless my boss reads this and makes me). Anytime you make a change to the Registry concerning D3, you must shutdown the service (the VME) and restart it again before the changes take affect (see *note below about shutdown). After creating your Database in the FSI, we’ll call this one ‘rob.great’ (hey, why not??) lets go back to the VME, type ‘set-device’ and select your tape drive (1/4, DAT, 8mm or floppy A: drive). Then type ‘t-rew’ then type ‘account-restore fsi:rob.great’. The prompts concerning your restore info should look familiar to you. Create your q-pointers, connect your printers, dev-make your serial lines, and have fun. This should be a new and exiting experience to you all. Try opening your Windows File Manager (Explorer) and take a look at your Databases in the FSI. You’ll find this under the drive and directory you selected during the install. If you have a WIN95 system, and used the defaults during Netsetup, your data can be found using the path c:\program files\D3\D3databases. Notice the file layout and such of the account Rob we created. It shows the File Control Block (FCB), the Master Dictionary (MD) and the Overflow (OVF).

I am not even scratching the surface (OK, maybe a scratch) of the features, flexibility, ease of use, and the power of D3-NT. I’ll leave all that to the marketing folks. I just wanted to get you started and a little excited about this product. PICK is doing its part in creating that bridge to the 21st century (why does that sound familiar ??) Try it, you’ll like it!!!

**** Note **** The above information was based on the first released cut of D3-NT, which would be Version 7.1.0.133. A few notes about D3-NT. Always do a ‘Shutdown’ after all users have logged off the system from a Telnet session by typing ‘shutdown’ at TCL. This will insure that all the user space gets returned back to the overflow table and helps keep the VME in a healthy and happy state. If you are running D3-NT on a WIN95 system, and forget to do a shutdown,  well I’m sorry. WIN95 has a bug (I’ve already emailed Bill G. on this one) where as it does not stop any background services like their NT products do when doing a Windows Shutdown (really rude). This usually only loses a chunk of overflow, and when restarted, will rebuild the database. I have seen a few situations where this was not the case, and had to load a new disk0.d3v (the BLOB) to fully recover. Yet another reason to keep your data in the FSI. Maybe if I’m bugged enough AGAIN to do another write up on D3-NT, we can go into some more basic features and tricks I have picked up along the way to make your life easier. Perhaps we can dabble in a little VB, and fire up the ODBC driver.