SPARTA News November 2005

November 2005

SPARTA Chapter President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

Well the colder weather has arrived, just not enough rain. So here we are in Central North Carolina with more than the leaves turning brown. Last month we had a visit from John Mycroft of Cobbs Mill Consulting to talk to us about their Dumpmarvel product. As a person who has been looking at a number of dumps lately, this looks like a nice product that can streamline the information in SYSUDUMPs.

At DHTS I've been having so much fun with our LE migration. Batch is going well but CICS has had a little hitch so we haven't migrated any of the production (or near production) regions yet. For some reason an LE enabled region is not honoring the PLI "ON ERROR . . ." statement properly. We have code that used this to trap an abend in a linked program and handle it. So far I haven't made any headway on this but will pass along the information as we resolve this issue. Another little project has been enabling SSL (secure socket layer) support for FTP, TELNET, and the web server. Since we have a zSeries system, I had to configure the ICSF support and then got into the fun of digital certificates and RACF. I am happy to say that with all the pieces/parts in place, SSL does work very well.

Over at DDA I'm still having fun learning to setup IMS 8.1. Had to take a small detour to help out on a small CICS issue. You'll never guess what can happen to a set of VSAM files when someone issues CEMT SET FILE(*) CLOSE EM (instead of CLOSE EN) and then opens the file. If the file is defined with the REUSE attribute, it will be EMptied! After getting called and restoring a few files, they were back on track again. Such fun.

This month our speaker from IBM will talk to us about New Applications for zSeries. I look forward to seeing you all there on the 29th at the IBM Briefing Center (Building 002) in RTP.

P.S. BarBQ, drinks, and dessert will be provided.

Special November Meeting Location

Link to IBM Executive Briefing Center info and directions:
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/briefingcenter/rtpbc/location.html


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


Nov. 29 - New Applications on zSeries by Dave Houston of IBM
Dec. 27 - No meeting. Happy Holidays!

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 Ron Pimblett by phone as noted below.

2005-2006 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
Duke Health Technology Solutions 919-668-0545
2424 Ervin Road, Suite 9000
Durham, NC 27710

Ron Pimblett - Vice President
Dignus, LLC 919-676-0847
8354 Six Forks Road
Raleigh, NC 27615

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-641-6235
201 N. Eugene St.
Greensboro, NC 27401

Tommy Thomas - Treasurer
LabCorp 336-436-4178
231 Maple Ave, Koury Ctr 3rd Fl. 919-361-7267
Burlington, NC 27215

Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute 919-531-4162
SAS Campus Drive
Cary, NC 27513

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 usually 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 Tommy Thomas. Tommy 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.

July 2005 CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V469 (dated July 17, 2005) are available from www.cbttape.org.

If you need help obtaining one or more files, contact Brad Carson at Duke Health or Ed Webb at SAS (see Board of Director’s list for contact info).

Minutes of the October 25th, 2005 Meeting

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

•Eleven (11) people were present; ten (10) were members.

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

•The minutes of September 2005 meeting were accepted as published in the October 2005 newsletter.

•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's report. As of October 18, 2005, the balance is $1593.06. Motion was made and approved to accept the 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 site is available. To access the SPARTA Web site, point your Web browser to this site: http://www.spartanc.org. Please send any comments or suggestions about the Web site to Mike Lockey. Be sure to check the site every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

•Brad Carson reminded everyone to keep the conference room clean.


NEW BUSINESS

•Future Speakers and Topics:
(subject to change)

November 2005 New Applications on zSeries by Dave Houston of IBM
December 2005 No Meeting
January 2006 RACF by Vanguard
February 2006 Bill Peiffer of LRS
March 2006 SHARE Conference overview


If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact Ron Pimblett.

•Thanks to Tommy Thomas of LabCorp for hosting the October meeting.

•The November 29th SPARTA meeting will be held at a special location: IBM’s Executive Briefing Center, Building 2, Davis Drive and Cornwallis Road in the RTP.

•Food for the November meeting will be BarBQ, drinks and dessert

•There was no other new business.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:45 p.m.

•John Mycroft of Cobbs Mill Consulting spoke about DumpMarvel.

Highlights:

-Point and shoot at an address - no more having to type in "Find" commands to go to the address you want.

-Set bookmarks so that you can come back to an interesting place in your dump.

-Name places in your dump so that you can go back to "INREC" whenever you like.

-Work from a menu of dump areas without having to chase registers, offsets and pointers.

-Format the chain of register save areas - find where you are and how you got there.

-Format system control blocks

-Handles SYSUDUMP and SYSABEND type dumps

-Complete analyzer for quick z/OS program dump analysis

-Works from inside TSO - no new environment to learn

-No need for source code or intermediate compile steps

-Works on any IBM or compatible mainframe running MVS or z/OS

-Runs under ISPF and is language-independent

Some of the topics John discussed were:

DumpMarvel

Why did we write it?
Assembler development (FileMarvel, etc.)
Too much irrelevant junk in dump
Irrelevant junk is sometimes relevant!
Needed more in-depth dump debugging
Didn't want dump archives, extra assembly steps
We missed paperclips

Analyzing a dump
DumpMarvel's menu
Vanilla dump
Control blocks
Point and shoot
Find a string (already found TCB - now find PRB)
Find something else
Registers
Assembler opcodes
Paperclips
Tag menu
Go to a tag
Wot, no source?? (disassembler)


Other Products:

Sim-Date Date Simulator

Time Simulator
Date Windowing

XABOVE - CICS Run 24 bit programs in 31 bit mode

FileMarvel ISPF or batch based file editor

Key/Master consulting

The meeting ended at 9:25 p.m.

Treasurer’s Report for November 2005

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $ 1540.41 as of November 16, 2005.

Financial Report
3/01/2004 through 10/18/2005

Items of Interest

SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2005

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

Nov. 29 - BarBQ
Dec. 27 - No meeting!


ServerPac for z/OS 1.7 Disappoints

contributed by Ed Webb

Having used the ServerPac process for several years, I have occasionally been annoyed at some problem or weakness of the Dialogs or processes. But in general it’s been an improving and positive experience.

However, with the ServerPac delivered with z/OS 1.7, I have been very disappointed. With three APARs so far, and none resolved after more than a month, I find myself wondering about the quality of the code and disappointed in IBM’s efforts to resolve problems.

Most frustrating is the problem reported by APAR OA13963 and noted in the ServerPac section of the ZOSV1R7 PSP bucket (of course, the APAR number is not mentioned in the PSP bucket). Basically the process to migrate your previous configuration (from z/OS 1.4 perhaps, or in my case, from z/OS 1.6) to 1.7 does not work correctly. Instead of honoring your changes to Space allocations based on the experience with previous systems, migration ignores the changes for HFS, zFS, and VSAM data sets, and uses the defaults shipped the ServerPac for z/OS 1.7.

Of course, there’s a circumvention. Redo manually what you changed in the previous configuration, including dsname changes, space allocations, and volser selection. What a pain!

A less important APAR (OA14015) reported the problem where the ServerPac Dialog only shows two digits for LRECL (for example, 12 instead of 125 for the CPAC.REPORTS data set). Because the servicing mechanism for the ServerPac dialog itself is so poor, do not expect to see a fix until Sept. 2006 with ServerPac for z/OS 1.8.

The third APAR, no official number but acknowledged as an error, will also be fixed in the Sept. 2006 timeframe. The dialog fails sometimes if you run the Prime PSA debugging trap, an undocumented IBM tool used here to find errors in our product code. Because most IBM ServerPac users are not running Prime PSA, this one is understandably low priority. But for someone who runs the debugging tool constantly on some systems, the lack of a timely fix is another source of frustration.


Redbook Draft of Interest

contributed by Ed Webb

Workload Manager Implementation and Exploitation
Published: November, 11, 2005 More details are available at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg246472.html


Zen and the Art of the New Datacenter

contributed by Ron Pimblett

We've been hearing a lot about Virtualization and now SOA everywhere which frankly is another 3 letter word that vendors are promoting these days.

I came across this article published in the summer that was possibly interesting to our audience, at least has some practicality to it.

Zen and the art of the new data center

* The new data center: The journey is as important as the destination
By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 06/07/05

It is relatively easy to sell the vision of the next-generation data center: Service-oriented applications running over a virtualized, service-oriented infrastructure. The benefits of agility, lower operational costs, better utilization and rapid application deployment represent motherhood and apple-pie - all good. Unless you're allergic to apples, that is.

Translating this vision into a series of discreet, incremental steps - a roadmap - is not so easy. Furthermore, selling the roadmap to upper management is a lot harder than selling the end-vision. So, instead of focusing solely on the end-goal, we suggest that each step of the journey can be just as valuable. The next-generation data center is self-fulfilling; each incremental step brings benefits that make it worthwhile long before you reach the final destination.

When "selling" the next-generation data center to upper management, don't try to sell it as a grand vision. The line between visionary and "head in the clouds" is thin. Instead, try to find the incremental return on investment that makes each step worthwhile:

* Storage consolidation and virtualization - This is a great first step, because it pays for itself while bringing you closer to a service-oriented infrastructure. A major network equipment vendor has increased utilization and reduced costs, saving $11 million while managing 4-petabytes of storage with the same team that managed 1-petabyte a few years ago. Meanwhile, it has cut application provisioning from weeks to minutes.

* "Greenfield" first - Don't expect a management mandate to do a "forklift" upgrade of your data center or your critical applications. Start by looking for opportunities to put your mark on data-center expansion or on new data centers. Look for new enterprise applications to introduce service-oriented architecture principles. The greenfield approach has been very effective for VoIP deployment where "forklift" is also not an option.

* N-tier applications - You don't need to re-engineer all your applications to make them "SOA" compatible. An n-tier Web application - one composed of a front-end presentation layer, an application server and a database, for example - can be migrated to a data center with virtualized computing and storage. The benefits will justify the service-oriented infrastructure without the need to migrate to a fully implemented service-oriented architecture.

You can use self-funding steps in moving your data center towards the next-generation vision. You can gain benefits from running your existing applications on a more flexible computing and storage infrastructure. For example, by using VMWare, a computing-virtualization tool, and VSAN, a storage-virtualization tool, you can take existing applications and make them more reliable, flexible and less expensive to manage. The virtualized infrastructure provides an abstraction layer that converts infrastructure "constraints" (the size and reliability of a storage system) into tweakable attributes (pick a size, pick a reliability level).

Undoubtedly, service-oriented applications can derive even more benefits from such an infrastructure, but you don't have to wait until you have those. As any motorcycle fan will tell you - the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.

DNS: The Internet's Achilles Heel

contributed by Chris Blackshire

By: Steve Gibson - A frightening secret of DNS reveals how a single malicious teenager could take down the entire Internet.

Internet technologists were surprised by how poorly the main DNS root servers performed during the several major worm and eMail virus outbreaks of recent years. Several of the 13 root servers failed completely under the load created by the worm and excessive eMail DNS lookups, raising concerns as to how much "excess power" our existing DNS system has "in reserve". Paul Mockapetris, the inventor and one of the key developers of the Domain Name System says that the developers of DNS never expected the system to remain in use this long. In other words, like so many other aspects and components of the Internet, DNS was never designed for the world it is being used in today.

The following Internet web pages provide additional background material for anyone interested in learning more about the history of the concerns surrounding the fragility of the Internet's Domain Name System:

This is a terrific, though technical, page of slides from a presentation on DNS Damage given by folks from CAIDA (the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis).
http://www.caida.org/outreach/presentations/ietf0112/dns.damage.html

This page talks a bit about the October 2002 DDoS attack against the 13 DNS root servers. This attack used "ICMP" (ping) packets to flood the DNS servers. Since DNS uses "UDP" protocol, ICMP packets were easily discarded and "filtered" to protect the root servers.
http://security.itworld.com/4339/021023attacks/page_1.html

An article that is directly on-point about the troubles with DNS: "Next-Generation Domain Name Solution Helps Telcos Stay Agile"
http://www.sun.com/br/0305_ezine/comms_dns.html

Another piece talking about the semi-successful October 2002 DNS attack:
http://lists.jammed.com/ISN/2002/10/0094.html

ABOUT THE GUEST
Steve Gibson is President & Founder Gibson Research Corporation -
www.GRC.com

Humor


Why We Forward Jokes

contributed by Chris Blackshire

This explains why we forward jokes.

A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead.

He remembered dying, and that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them.

After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight.

When he was standing before it he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold. He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side.

When he was close enough, he called out, "Excuse me, where are we?"

"This is Heaven, sir," the man answered.

"Wow! Would you happen to have some water?" the man asked.

"Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right
up."

The man gestured, and the gate began to open.

"Can my friend," gesturing toward his dog, "come in, too?" the traveler asked.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't accept pets."

The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued the way he had been going with his dog.

After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road leading through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence.

As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.

"Excuse me!" he called to the man. "Do you have any water?"

"Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there, come on in."

"How about my friend here?" the traveler gestured to the dog.

"There should be a bowl by the pump."

They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it.

The traveler filled the water bowl and took a long drink himself, then he gave some to the dog.

When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree.

"What do you call this place?" the traveler asked.

"This is Heaven," he answered.

"Well, that's confusing," the traveler said. "The man down the road said that was Heaven, too."

"Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That's hell."

"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"

"No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind."

Soooo..

Sometimes, we wonder why friends keep forwarding jokes to us without writing a word.

Maybe this will explain.

When you are very busy, but still want to keep in touch, guess what you do? You forward jokes.

When you have nothing to say, but still want to keep contact, you forward jokes.

When you have something to say, but don't know what, and don't know how, you forward jokes.

Also to let you know that you are still remembered, you are still important, you are still loved, you are still cared for, guess what you get?

A forwarded joke.

So, next time if you get a joke, don't think that you've been sent just another forwarded joke, but that you've been thought of today and your friend on the other end of your computer wanted to send you a smile.

You are welcome @ my water bowl anytime.

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Special Location: IBM Briefing Center in the RTP

Take Exit 280 from I-40 onto Davis Drive and go North. Go through a stop light (Cornwallis Road) to the IBM main gates. IBMers will be asked to show their badge; guests not being escorted by an IBMer will be asked to register with security at the entrance gate—these guests should identify themselves as a visitor to the RTP Executive Briefing Center.

Follow this road (IBM signs will direct you to Building 002 Main Lobby), turning right at the first STOP sign. Go past the Main Entrance (circle drive). The Building 002 Visitor Parking Lot is now controlled upon entry to the lot. All visitors should press the lot entrance intercom button and the Building 002 Receptionist or IBM Security will grant remote access.  Please identify yourself as a visitor to the IBM Executive Briefing Center.

Link to IBM Executive Briefing Center info and directions:
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/briefingcenter/rtpbc/location.html

Free Food: BarBQ, Drinks, Dessert

Program:

New Applications on zSeries

Speaker:

Dave Houston of IBM

SPARTA News
P.O. Box 13194
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3194



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