SPARTA News September 2010

September 2010

SPARTA President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

Welcome to fall and the end of the hottest summer ever in central North Carolina. I wonder if this means we’ll have a cold winter now. I’ve been down here in North Carolina for 25 years now and have gotten used to the roller coast weather rides, but all the pollen is another story.

Sorry I had to miss our night out at the DBAP last month but some health issues have been keeping me very busy. It sounded like everyone there had a good time, but Ron Pimblett had a close call with foul ball. I hope we can keep this “tradition” of an annual outing for baseball or hockey. It’s good to take a break and do some non-technical things.

On our z/OS 1.11 system we’ve managed to trip over a bug in PDSE support. It seems that if you have a PDSE and are adding 100K members to it, after about 30K, CPU usage goes through the roof. We had a critical production job go down on a 322 abend because of this. This also affects the overall run time for the job(s) that were processing such a large PDSE. One such job that ran in about 3 hours on z/OS 1.9 ran in 32 on z/OS 1.11.  NOT GOOD.  IBM has APAR OA34214 for this issue. In the meantime I’ve converted the one set of jobs back to using a PDS while we get the corrective maintenance on the system. Users of z/OS 1.12 can also experience the same issue with large PDSE’s as well.

I hope to be ordering z/VM 6.1 the first week of October. We’ve cleared all the prerequisite work and our ready to begin the installation. We’ll be training another member of our staff on doing the z/VM install work so that I won’t have to be as involved this time. Seems that my management wants me to work on our 2011 budget instead. Oh well.

This month I’ll be giving my report about SHARE 115 in Boston. I look forward to seeing you on the 28th at LabCorp.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


Sept. 28 SHARE Reports from SPARTA members

Oct. 26 New IBM zEnterprise z196 at IBM RTP

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.

2010-2011 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
LabCorp 336-436-8294
3060 S. Church St.
Burlington, NC 27215

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
3060 S. Church St. 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 e-Mailings

The SPARTA policy is to e-mail a monthly notice to our SPARTA-L Group. The newsletter is posted to the website about five (5) days before each meeting so you can prepare. The SPARTA-L Group is maintained by Brad Carson; if you have corrections or problems receiving your meeting notice, contact Brad at 336-436-8294.

Late 2009 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V478 (dated December 27, 2009) are available from www.cbttape.org.

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

Minutes of the August 31, 2010 Meeting

•SPARTA met at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP) in Durham, North Carolina for an evening out at the ballpark. Many thanks to Tommy Thomas for free admittance to good seats. And thanks to the Bulls for a big win!

Treasurer’s Report for September 2010

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $1072.72 as of September 20, 2010.

Financial Report
3/01/2010 through 9/20/2010

Items of Interest


SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2010

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

Sept. 28 - Pizza
Oct. 26 - Chicken
Nov. 30 - Subs
Dec. 28 - No meeting. Happy Holidays!


J.P. Morgan Chase Offers Full Apology For Web Outage

contributed by Ed Webb

J.P. Morgan Chase has issued an apology for the 2 day outage of Chase.com, its internet banking site, and offered restitution for problems caused by the outage. Here’s the apology: https://www.chase.com/index.jsp?pg_name=ccpmapp/shared/marketing/page/outage.

Of particular interest to system programmers is the cause of the embarrassing outage. Here’s one blogger’s reporting (basically: “bug” in Oracle on Solaris): http://www.dbms2.com/2010/09/17/jp-morgan-chase-oracle-database-outage/


IBM System z Technical University in October

contributed by Ed Webb

IBM’s System z tech conference, now named the System z Technical University, takes place in Boston early in October (4-8) 2010. The conference is at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, just across the street from the recent SHARE in Boston

Here’s a link to more details: http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03001c/services/learning/ites.wss/zz/en?pageType=page&c=K599757C69457P74.

IBM Replacing Electronic Technical Request (ETR) system

contributed by Ed Webb

If you are an active user of IBM’s ServiceLink or ETR functions, you have seen this notice of upcoming changes.

“We are pleased to announce that the next generation of IBM's ETR electronic tool is launching during 4Q 2010 with the enhanced IBM Service Request (SR) tool. ETR problem reporting functions will be migrated to this new version of SR. To ensure a smooth transition, both ETR and SR tools will be available on IBM ServiceLink during the migration.

The enhancements featured in SR include:
• The ability to search through archived service requests
• A new efficient search of products and components for creating either usage or defect service requests
• Enhanced system reliability and availability
• The ability to save new service requests as drafts for subsequent submission and reuse
• An organized Problem Description page that makes it easier to submit related data files
• A single, consistent web based problem submission tool for any IBM software product.

Watch this page for upcoming news and communications regarding these changes.

Thank you,
IBM Technical Support Transformation Team”

So what the heck is going on? Here’s a presentation from the August 2010 SHARE that helps explain: http://proceedings.share.org/client_files/SHARE_in_Boston_2/Session_7726_handout_121_0.pdf


Control Area Reclaim is Major z/OS R12 Function

contributed by Ed Webb

The long-desired VSAM Control Area (CA) Reclaim function is finally available in z/OS V1R12. Here’s a recent article that provides some details:

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1519783,00.html?track=NL-576&ad=785198&asrc=EM_NLN_12474242


Two Good Introductions to z/OS TCP/IP

contributed by Ed Webb

Here are two recent presentations that describe the basics of TCP/IP on z/OS. Good introductions for your zNextGenner of any age or a nice refresher for yourself:

http://www.gsezos.be/PDF-Files/051123%20-%20TCPIP%20An%20Introduction.pdf

http://share.confex.com/share/115/webprogram/Handout/Session7119/Introductin%20to%20TCPIP.pdf


Humor


Come Hell or High Water

contributed by Ron Pimblett

Overnight, a torrential rain storm soaked Raleigh Durham.

When morning dawned the resulting floodwaters came up about 5 feet into most of the homes in the south Durham area, an area below sea level.

Doreen Bryant was sitting on top her roof with her next door neighbor, Molly Borden waiting for the emergency services to rescue them.

Doreen noticed a lone straw hat floating near the house. Then she saw it float far out into the front garden, then float all the way back to the house, it kept floating away from the house, then back in. Her curiosity got the best of her, so she asked Molly, 'Do you see that straw hat floating away from the house, then back again?'

'Oh yes, Doreen,' grinned Molly, 'that's Bert, my husband, wearing his gardening hat; he told me yesterday that he was going to cut the grass today come Hell or high water.'

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, September 28, 2010
7 p.m.

LabCorp in the RTP

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.

Free Food: Pizza, Drink, Dessert

Program:

Boston SHARE Conference Report

Speaker:

Brad Carson of LabCorp

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

First Class Postage

SPARTA Corporate Sponsors: