I wanted to give a warning regarding APAR OA17011 (closed, with published PTF's available). There has been a "hole" in IBM SMS Managed Tape for a long time (day-1 possibly), were the "Retention Limit" value in the Management Class was not enforced. So, if the Retention Limit was 0 and the JCL said RETPD=10; it was allowed to have a 10-day retention. With OA17011, this hole has been closed and the "Retention Limit" value is now enforced. This means, if someone has a Retention Limit of 0 (instead of "NOLIMIT") and they create a tape file with a RETPD=10 or EXPDT=99365 (think HSM) the actual JFCB expiration date (and the date put into HDR1) will be zero as if no expiration date had been specified at all.
If you have a tape management system (who doesn't), and the tape management system has some retention rules (RDS for CA-1, RMF for TLMS, Vital Records for DFSMSrmm); those will override and you will be safe. However, if you have tape datasets that are SMS managed AND you do not override ALL JCL specified retention values with rules, I would suggest you review your Management Class definitions and make sure you do not have any Retention Limit values that might have a negative impact. I have had at least 2 clients lose many tapes (early expiration date means early scratch) because of this. Russell Witt CA-1 Level-2 Support Manager ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
