SPARTA News February 2001

February 2001

SPARTA Chapter President’s Corner

- by Chris Blackshire

The February meeting will start our chapter 2001 election process. We will not have any chads to make our election a long drawn out process, but we do need members to run for office.

This meeting will start the 4 step election process as follows: 1) February meeting - a nomination committee is setup, 2) March meeting - a slate of candidates will be presented, 3) April meeting - elections will be held, and 4) May meeting - the new officers will take over.

We need members to run for the following offices: President - presides over the monthly meeting (a new president will be elected). Vice President - sets up the speakers for each meeting. Secretary - takes the minutes of the meetings. Treasurer - tracks incoming and outgoing money. Communications - publishes the monthly newsletter.

Please volunteer to either chair or be part of the nomination committee.

Member duties - volunteer for an office, vote for your representatives, come to the meetings, submit articles for the newsletter, pay your annual dues, give your undivided attention and feedback to our monthly speakers, and support our speakers.

See you Tuesday February 27th, 2001 at LabCorp. Pizza, drinks, and dessert will be provided.

Thanks to all who have paid their dues. If you haven’t paid yet, please bring your 2001 annual SPARTA dues ($20) to the February meeting.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


Feb. 27 IBM’s Service Update Facility by Ed Webb of SAS
Mar. 27 SHARE Reports by Duane Reaugh of DTS and Mike Lockey of Guilford County
Apr. 24 TBA


We need ideas and volunteers for future speakers. 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 by phone or e-mail as noted below.


A SPARTA Corporate Sponsor:

2000-2001 SPARTA
Board of Directors

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
GlaxoSK 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 919-531-4162
SAS Campus Drive 919-362-0232 (Home)
Cary, NC 27513 EDWISTUO@aol.com

Meetings

Meetings are scheduled for the last Tuesday evening of each month (except no meeting in December), with optional dinner at 6:15 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.

Call for Articles

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.

Newsletter Mailings

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.

Latest CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V432 (dated Jan. 25, 2001) are available from www.cbttape.org.

If you need a complete tape, contact Brad at LabCorp (Brad_Carson@labcorp.com or 336-436-4065) or Ed Webb (see Director’s list for contact info).

Minutes of the January 30, 2001 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Chris Blackshire, the Chapter President.

•Fifteen (15) people were present; thirteen (13) were members.

•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job functions.

•The minutes of November 2000 meeting were accepted as published in the January 2001 newsletter.

•Duane Reaugh, the SPARTA treasurer, reported the latest balance is $300.72.

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:

February 2001 - IBM SUF, Ed Webb
March 2001 - SHARE, Duane Reaugh and Mike Lockey
Other ideas:
- TDMF - Ken Frump
- WLM Goal Mode - Jim Horne
- UNIX Services for OS/390
- IBM New Announcements
- CICS Web Bridge

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact John Bryant.

•The February 27th meeting will be at LabCorp in the RTP.

•Food for the February 2001 meeting will be pizza and sodas.

•Thanks to Brad Carson of LabCorp for hosting the November meeting.

•DTS Software and Phillips Software have become corporate sponsors of SPARTA. They will each receive 5 memberships and their company logo will be displayed on the SPARTA web page and newsletter.

•NaSPA now has a Chapter Coordinator and is starting chapters. Mike Lockey will contact NaSPA for more information.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:20 PM.

•Pete Boundy of StorageTek talked about the new Virtual Tape product offered by STK. Topics that Pete talked about were:

Introduction to Virtual Storage Manager (VSM)

VSM Hardware
Virtualization; separating the logical from the physical
Architectural Overview
Data Path
Control Path
Physical Tape Drives
Virtual Tape Storage Server (VTSS)
Single Scalable Repository
Up to 16 MVS hosts
Up to 14 ESCON channels to VTSS
Up to 8 ESCON migration recall paths
Up to 64 virtual 3490E drives
Up to 100,000 virtual tape volumes
Up to 256 VTSS
Based on STK 9500 Shared Virtual Array
Raid 6+
Mainframe class DASD redundancy
VSM Performance Improvements
VSM Significant New Advantages

VSM Software
Virtual Tape Control System (VTCS)
Extension to Host Software Component (HSC)
Basic Management Policies
Advanced Management Policies
Enhancement Summary
Benefits
Increased Automation
Improved Performance
Reduced Hardware
Reduced Conversions
Investment Protection

•The meeting was adjourned at 8:30 PM.

Treasurer’s Report for February 2001

contributed by Duane Reaugh

We had 10 people renew their membership and Phillips Consulting became a corporate sponsor so the bank balance is now $ 602.69.

Items of Interest

CBT “tape” V532 available

contributed by Ed Webb

(Excerpts from a recent CBT mailing):

There is a new CBT Tape available to download or order on 3480 cartridge.

The current CBT Tape is now CBT432 (01-25-01) and the current Overflow tape is still COV428. All available to download now from http://www.cbttape.org

View a complete list of changes since the CBT423 at http://www.cbttape.org/relchgs.htm

There are some real gems added and updated on CBT432 including

Update to Files 238 thru 242 which is the Super Disassembler called REASM from Valentin Chernyak. Some of these files have been much extended.

Addition of File 243 which is source code for the Super Disassembler called REASM from Valentin Chernyak. Some of it is commented in Russian. Most is commented in English.

Valentin has kindly shared the last updates to REASM with everyone. If you need a Disassembler for the purpose of building a module you intend to assemble again this interactive tools takes a neat approach.

Addition of File 493 from Jim Connelley, with several extremely useful tools, notably a “reverse IDCAMS” which points at a VSAM file and generates IDCAMS control statements to DEFINE a clone of it.

Addition of File 495 from Tom Conley. This is an “ISPF Starter” package to make it easier to install a product’s ISPF interface, without adding more ddnames to the LOGON PROC. Many examples, for many different commonly-used products, are included.

Addition of File 501 from Ken Clapp. This file contains an SNTP time server, and some other related stuff. An SNTP time server is used for synchronizing your OS/390 system clock.

Ken is presenting a session at the upcoming SHARE in Long Beach. Session 2968 Synchronize Everyone to Your Sysplex Timer.

+---------------------------------+

[ COBOL not Dead yet? ]

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/cobol/?dwzone=linux

Richard Higson recently pointed out this fairly good article on COBOL at IBM’s DevelopWorks Site.

+---------------------------------+

[Hercules Emulator supports z/Architecture ]

The first public release of Hercules that supports the z/Architecture, as well as the present System/370 and ESA/390, is now available. Hercules 2.10 contains many improvements over the last version 1 release, 1.71, as well as preliminary support for the 64-bit z/Architecture. In particular, 2.10 provides support for the TUN/TAP network interface built into the Linux 2.4 kernel and available for other versions. The specific changes are too voluminous to list here; check out the What’s New page and the CHANGES file in the source distribution for details.

Hercules is a a free, open source software implementation of the mainframe System/370 and ESA/390 architectures, in addition to the new 64-bit z/Architecture. Hercules runs under Linux, Windows 98, Windows NT, and Windows 2000.

Freely available IBM operating systems such as MVT, MVS 3.8J, VM/370 R6, and more are being explored by hobbyists using Hercules.

Learn more at the Hercules Home Page http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/

+---------------------------------+
[ Interesting Links ]

Al Sherkow shares some excellent papers and presentation he has done many from the recent CMG 2000 at

http://www.sherkow.com/papers/index.html#halfsec

These include

LPAR and Parallel Sysplex Capacity Planning Update from CMG 2000, Upper Bound Analysis for e-Business Capacity Planning from CMG 2000, IRD, LPAR Clusters and Changes in PR/SM from CMG 2000, and IBM’s New Workload License Charges from CMG 2000.

+---------------------------------+
[ PC Freeware for Dino’s ]

Nigel Pentland’s PC Utilities relating to RACF were recently updated January 24 , 2001.

The ‘RACF’ utilities are text processing programs which take an IRRDBU00 ASCII flat file download from RACF and produces as output text reports and depending on the program JCL which can be checked, transferred back to mainframe and submitted.

Nigel is an active contributor on the RACF-L mailing list and his utilities are excellent tools for anyone responsible for RACF security. Find them on the web at http://www.cairnleck.co.uk/nigel/racf.htm

Thoughts

Value Time

contributed by Chris Blackshire

To realize the value of ten years:
Ask a newly divorced couple.

To realize the value of four years:
Ask two, now single, high school sweethearts.

To realize the value of one year:
Ask a student who has failed a final exam.

To realize the value of nine months:
Ask a mother who gave birth to a still born.

To realize the value of one month:
Ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby.

To realize the value of one week:
Ask an editor of a weekly newspaper.

To realize the value of one hour:
Ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.

To realize the value of one minute:
Ask a person who has missed the train, bus or plane.

To realize the value of one second:
Ask a person who has survived an accident.

To realize the value of one millisecond: Ask the person who has won a silver medal in the Olympics.

Time waits for no one. Treasure every moment you have. You will treasure it even more when you can share it with someone special.