I recently upgraded from 5.2.mumble to 5.3.2.1; In the intervening weeks, I've noticed a behavior change which I don't see addressed in the change notes. I'm hoping for corroboration, and perhaps a comment from one of our onlooking developers.
In 5.2, my user interaction looked like this: 1) Run BACKUP STGPOOL primpool copypool 2) New process appears in process listing 3) prompt returns 4) process looks for uncopied data, has status numbers of 0 files, 0 bytes until it finds some. It might never find any, in which case it reports success, with 0 files, 0 bytes as additional information. In 5.3, the following happens 1) Run BACKUP STGPOOL primpool copypool 2) prompt does not return 3) a process starts, not reflected in the process listing, and looks for uncopied data. 4) if the process finds uncopied data, THEN: 4a) The prompt returns 4b) a process appears in the process listing, life goes on as before. 5) if the process does not find uncopied data THEN: 5a) The prompt returns with a ANR2111W, 'no data to process'. 5b) no process appears I Can tell that 3) happens, because if I try to run another backup stgpool, I get the conventional 'backup already in progress' message. But it's not reflected in the process table. I have several servers which take >8hrs to run a good stgpool backup, even if they do no new copying work. That's a long time to have something going on behind the scenes. This block-the-command-flow behavior is really disruptive; the process once started is declared as 'background', and WAIT still defaults to no. But this is definitely a foreground process. So: Do you-all share my impression here, and any IBMers want to comment? - Allen S. Rout
