I'll second Jon's comments. I made a lot of use of two automation tools
from the CBT tape. AUTO and COMMAND were the tools. I mostly used COMMAND,
which lets you issue a series of commands by putting them in a PDS member.
If you have some automation software that can key on messages, that is a big
help. As an example, when a message like VTAM Initialization Complete
appears, we used to issue commands to start TSO, CA7, and a TCPIP.
COMMAND also works well for shutting down the system. You can put waits in
the command stream also. Issue 3 commands, wait 10 seconds, and then issue
a bunch more. COMMAND also can reply to outstanding messages. If a long
running started task being shut down has one console message always
outstanding, you can issue a command to reply to its jobname to shut it
down.
I also used AUTO on the CBT tape, but that is almost better for normal daily
processing as it allows you to issue commands by time. It is very flexible,
allowing you to run a command at a givin time on the 10th day of the month,
every Tuesday, etc.
I have to agree with what Walt said - if you can't get it right every week,
how are you going to get it right twice a year? I bet that means that you
will have to come in. When I was at P&H Mining, on Saturday evening we
always shut everything down to do backups at 6:00 P.M. It only took another
15 minutes or so to do an IPL from that point and be back up and running
again. If you can do weekly, or even monthly IPLs, I would reconsider after
automating everything you can. I know that after I got the shutdown and IPL
automated, there was only 2 or 3 things that the operator had to do on both
the IPL and the shutdown. We had very few problems.
If you can't afford the time to IPL more often than twice a year, then you
obviously have to go to the twice a year schedule. I think the longer you
go between IPLs, the greater your chance of not coming up becomes do to
changes etc.
Eric Bielefeld
Sr. z/OS Systems Programmer
Milwaukee Wisconsin
414-475-7434
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Brock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The more human involvement in your IPL procedures, the more trouble you
are likely to have at IPL time, be it weekly, monthly, or whatever.
Consider automating as much of the process as you can while allowing
control points for technical personnel to jump in during the process for
those times when something different needs to be done.
Jon
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
