This week, I am into survivor madness, hence the subject for August.
Just imagine that the glass house computer room that you work
in is a deserted island. The only people on the island are your
fellow castaways or that is how company management makes you feel.
Each year with the downsizing and/or outsourcing trends, one or
more of your coworkers are kicked off. And you don’t even
get to vote. Does this sound like your mainframe environment?
What are you doing to ensure that the next castaway is not you?
Are you forming an alliance? Are you ensuring that you are the
one feeding the others? Are you the indispensable one? Are you
keeping you talents up to date? Are you learning new skills that
are needed to meet future requirements? Are you helping your manager
succeed? Are you helping your company succeed?
I personally believe that if you can answer yes to the above questions,
you will be a survivor.
Next meeting is on Tuesday, August 29, at LabCorp – pizza,
drinks, and dessert will be provided.
Future Speakers
(subject to change)
August 29 SHARE Summer 2000 by Ed Webb of SAS
Sept. 26 IBM’s eBusiness Solutions by Tom Rydzewski of
IBM
We need ideas and volunteers for future speakers. Please consider
giving a presentation at a future meeting. Presentations don’t
have to be fancy, just informative and interesting. Even a 5 or
10 minute talk can start an interesting interaction. Contact John
Bryant at the phone number or e-mail address below.
Chris Blackshire - President
Perot Systems 919-992-4602
P.O. Box 13010
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Chris.Blackshire@nortelnetworks.com
John Bryant - Vice President
Glaxo Wellcome Inc. 919-483-9548
M/S D111; 5 Moore Drive
RTP, NC 27709 JEB33378@GLAXOWELLCOME.COM
Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-412-6235
201 N. Eugene St. 336-227-2021 (Home)
Greensboro, NC 27401 MLOCKEY@netpath.net
Duane Reaugh - Treasurer
DTS Software 919-833-8426
2913 Wake Forest Road
Raleigh, NC 27609-7841 Duane@DTSsoftware.com
Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute 919-677-8000 x4162
SAS Campus Drive 919-362-0232 (Home)
Cary, NC 27513 EDWISTUO@aol.com
Meetings are scheduled for the last Tuesday evening of each
month (except no meeting in December), with optional dinner at
6:30 p.m. and the meeting beginning at 7:00 p.m.
These monthly meetings are held at LabCorp’s Center for Molecular
Biology and Pathology (CMBP) near the Research Triangle Park (see
last page). Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn
right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right
into LabCorp complex and turn Left to the CMBP Building. In the
lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Brad Carson. Brad will escort
you to the conference room.
If you have any ideas for speakers, presentations, newsletter
articles, or are interested in taking part in a presentation,
PLEASE contact one of the Board of Directors with your suggestions.
The SPARTA chapter policy is to mail a copy of the monthly chapter
newsletter to each SPARTA member, NaSPA national, each advertiser,
persons who have requested a copy, and to other chapters who send
us a copy of their newsletter. The newsletter is mailed about
the 20th of each month so you can prepare for the meeting. The
mailing list is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 412-6235; if
you have corrections or problems receiving your newsletter, call
Mike.
Brad Carson now has copies of version 421 dated August 1999 of
the CBT tape. Brad brings cartridges to each meeting and swaps
a scratch cartridge for a copy of the CBT. If you need a round
tape, contact Brad at LabCorp (Brad_Carson@labcorp.com or 336-436-4065)
for details on sending a tape to LabCorp.
The new CBT tape is also available from www.cbttape.org.
•Meeting was called to order at 7:10 PM by Chris Blackshire,
the Chapter President.
•Nine (9) people were present; eight (8) were members.
•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they
worked, and briefly described their job functions.
•The minutes of June 2000 meeting were accepted as published
in the July 2000 newsletter.
•Duane Reaugh, the SPARTA treasurer, was not able to attend
the meeting; there was no Treasurer’s Report.
OLD BUSINESS
•Articles are needed for this newsletter. If you would like
to write an article for this newsletter, please contact Ed Webb.
Keep in mind that you don’t really need to write the article,
it can be an article that you read that you would like to share
with the membership.
•The SPARTA Web page is now available. To access the SPARTA
Web page, point your Web browser to this site: www.netpath.net/~mlockey/sparta.html.
Please send any comments or suggestions about the Web page to
Mike Lockey (mlockey@netpath.net). Be sure to check the Web page
every once in a while to see any new or changed information.
NEW BUSINESS
•Future Speakers and Topics:
August 2000 - Dave Rivers of Dignus about a C compiler
September 2000 - Tom Rydzewski of IBM
Other ideas:
- UNIX Services for OS/390
- IBM New Announcements
- Workload Manager
- SAP
If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact John
Bryant.
•The August meeting will be at LabCorp in the RTP.
•Food for the August 2000 meeting will be pizza and sodas.
•Thanks to Brad Carson of LabCorp for hosting the July meeting.
•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:50 PM.
•LabCorp has a System Programmer position open, contact Tom
Cannada (CannadaT@LabCorp.com) for more information.
•John Bryant of Glaxo Wellcome talked about the ISPF ISRDDN
Diagnostic utility and about AFP Printing with VPS.
-The ISRDDN utility is available starting with ISPF V4
and has been enhanced with later releases of ISPF (OS/390 2.5
and higher). ISRDDN features are:
Lists allocated DD names
Lists system ENQs
Lists data sets causing system ENQ contention
Primitive means of viewing storage within a TSO user’s address
space
Facilities for gathering information about your environment
-ISRDDN can also answer the following:
What library did a module get loaded from?
What members of load modules are duplicated in my current allocations?
-John also discussed how VPS software from LRS was configured
and used at Glaxo Wellcome to print AFP output to remote printers
(HP PCL and TCP/IP).
•The meeting was adjourned at 9:00 PM.
contributed by Duane Reaugh
The balance as of June 30, 2000 is $329.08. There is no report
for July 2000.
Items of Interest
OS/390 FTP Data Translation
contributed by Ed Webb
After reviewing the OS/390 SecureWay Communications Server: IP
Configuration for OS/390 R8 online book, and finding an informational
item from IBM titled “Definition of STANDARD SBCS code translation
table” (later in this note), I can provide some information
that should help with your FTP translations.
By default, an FTP transfer from UNIX to MVS will use an IBM-supplied
translate table named STANDARD for ASCII-to-EBCDIC and vice versa
translation. The source for this table is in TCPIP.SEZATCPX member
STANDARD on any OS/390 systems. As an IBM informational item (later
in this note) concludes, this translation table is an undocumented
and incorrect table that has been used for many years by IBM mainframe
installations. It is the only translate table for TCPIP that IBM
provides in binary format for use “right out of the box”.
However, IBM has provided several documented and standards-compliant
translate tables as members of TCPIP.SEZATCPX, such as SPANISH,
and for English purposes, OEMVS311 which is the 1047 (EBCDIC)
and ISO 8859 (ASCII) table. To use one of these alternate tables
when FTPing, you have to perform two steps: create a binary of
the needed table and tell FTP to use your table instead of its
default.
To create a binary of your translate table, use a job like this
CONVXLAT one:
//S00100 EXEC PGM=CONVXLAT,
// PARM=’’’TCPIP.SEZATCPX(SPANISH)’’
SPANISH.TCPXLBIN’
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSIN DD DUMMY,BLKSIZE=80
Caution: The apostrophes are significant.
This job creates a binary file of your translate table in an OS/390
data set named youruserid.SPANISH.TCPXLBIN.
To tell FTP to use your new translate table, include this SITE
command in your FTP session before doing a PUT:
site sbd=YOURUSERID.SPANISH.TCPXLBIN ; sbd is short for “sbdataconn”
that controls translation for data transfers.
Caution: The data set name must be in UPPERCASE without any apostrophes
or quotation marks.
Here’s the IBM informational item (SBCS is Single Byte Character
Set):
Item RTA000150464
Last updated . . . 06/08/98
Definition of STANDARD SBCS code translation table
Q:
Topic thread:
Communications Systems (CSYS)
TCPIP
MVS TCP/IP V3R2 MVSTCPIP
CSYS CSYSMVIP
When using FTP, the default SBCS translation table used is the
one named ‘STANDARD’, which we can find source member
in tcpip.SEZATCPX (STANDARD). However, we cannot define which
code page is used in this table, because there is no comment as
in other tables. The customer’s question is what is the name
of the code page used for STANDARD table? To be clear, we need
EBCDIC/ASCII code page number used in this table’s translation.
Thank you in advance.
A:
The STANDARD table is a holdover from the “olden days.”
It is a legacy table that has many anomalies and has never been
documented. It is very close to the 7-bit ASCII code page 367
and the EBCDIC code page 037. However, the reverse translation
goes from EBCDIC to 8-bit ASCII, where the high-order ASCII bit
is discarded. Other coding mismatches are in the table also, for
example, ASCII 1C maps to EBCDIC 22 - it should be EBCDIC 1C.
This is all totally illogical, but that is the way the table was
built years ago. The IBM recommendation is to use the STANDARD
table unless it causes you problems since this is the only table
that we also ship in BINARY. If you run into problems with it,
use another appropriate table and convert it to BINARY with CONVXLAT.
The other tables are reliable and well-documented unlike the so-called
STANDARD table.
SCMG in RTP in September
contributed by Duane Reaugh
The Southern Computer Measurement Group will hold its Fall 2000
Conference at the Holiday Inn in Research Triangle Park, NC on
September 28 and 29, 2000. This is the same hotel we have used
for the last several fall conferences.
We generally run dual tracks at the conference, one for mainframe
topics and one for other topics such as distributed systems and
networking. See Conference Agenda at http://www.cmg.org/regions/scmg/index.html
CMG in Orlando in December
contributed by Ed Webb
It’s not too early to start thinking about CMG 2000. It’s
being held in Orlando, Florida, December 10-15, 2000. Cheryl Watson
will be giving a session on “Interpreting RMF Reports.”
For more information on the conference, please check out http://www.cmg.org.
Interesting Thought
Dalai Lama On the Millennium
contributed by Chris Blackshire
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve
great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
Respect for self
Respect for others and
Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful
stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate
steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and
think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your
life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current
situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love
for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to
get it.
19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.
Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto
Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp
complex and turn left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign
in as a visitor to see Brad Carson. Brad will escort you to the
conference room.
SPARTA News
P.O. Box 13194
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3194
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