On Jan 9, 2008, at 10:13 PM, Bruce Baxter wrote:
ftp directly between the two systems, quite simply isn't an
option. Our
business partner chose the mechanism in palce to deal with multiple
other
shops, and they're not likely to want to do this sort of one-off
thing for us.
I also took some of the previous comments regarding the RDW site
command
(which I'd seen before) and did some testing. As stated by another
poster,
there doesn't seem to be any way to get it to honor this and strip
it off on
the final FTP.
I also have to deal with the issue that EITHER the EBCDIC code
pages on
either end don't match (less likely) or the ASCII code pages don't
match (more
likely) since the end user has subsequently reported to me that
they've seen
some data corruption due to the translation. I guess they were
expecting a
cent sign character in someof their data.
Bruce,
I can't answer your question directly but....
I worked at a company that for years took ORDERS on how file transfer
was to be done.
I was instrumental on getting every company to change over to use
either BSC or SNA (mostly SNA) because JES3 (at the time did not
support it and I think VM didn't either). It took me about 1 and 1/2
years to get everyone changed over. I did it with a combination of
talking to the techies DIRECTLY at the other companies and I also
met with the people who went out to talk with the really remote users
and let them know via spec sheet what we offered. I got the best
results when I was at GUIDE and talking to people from the respective
companies and convinced them to change. I was doing an average of 1
company a week (sometimes 2 or 3). I would get a call on Monday and
go over the changes needed to JES2 and their 3745. A week later (or
the length of time they asked for) I would call them back and I
would set up a schedule so in case of network issues I would have our
hardware type there to look at the line to see what the issue was. In
the year and a half I converted well over 200 users and I had (new)
users on a wait list clamoring to get on board. There were about 3
issues I bumped into 1. sysprog (or the network person) from the
other company would get bumped for another project) and had to
reschedule 2. The sysprog would think they were the expert and go off
on their own and set up the JES2 parms or VTAM mode table. 3. The
line was not switched over to us properly for temporary testing.
The "other" quite minor issue was the program that sent and received
the the data was an IBM FDP. Sometimes IBM would squawk about sending
it out. I never did get a good answer as to why they squawked but as
soon as I heard they had a license (it was extremely cheap $25 a
month IIRC) I would cut a tape and have it delivered in source
format the next day. IBM gave out source and all they had to do was
compile and link it and it was ready to go (no APF required). The
sysprogs could handle that easily and it was normally done the day
they got the tape. The other issue we ran into was a VTAM issue (its
not an issue now but then it was) but we were able to get by rather
easily by a small change on their end.
The point is if you let the techies talk without management in the
middle things tend to go rather smoothly at least that is what I found.
Ed
ps: After I got the connection going and the network people were
aware of the connection I turned the rest of the process over to our
production support and they were average but OK and they got the user
up and running within a week.
Without the help of the hardware network people I would have stumbled
a little bit as we had a good group. I was OK with guessing about
some of the hardware issues but they were excellent and could spot
the issue in 2 or 3 minutes or less. Our hardest user was a bisync
RJE station that would randomly drop data I just sicked our hardware
people on them and they got the problem resolved after a month or so.
We had by the end of the 1.5 year well over 100 and probably closer
to 200 people NJE and RJE and RSCS and other (too far back to
remember what other were but they were unusual).
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