> :>If someone showed interest in becoming such a fabled magician, what > direction would you point said someone to? > > Start with simple SYSMDUMPs and work your way up. > > Learn the trace table.
Very good advise. The system trace table can be more interesting than any thriller you could watch/read. Become familiar with how a process appears in the system trace table, for instance what happens when a tcb gets attached and then dispatched for the first time. Learn how to tell if you're executing in xmem mode, on what processor, in which addressing mode. Become very familiar with the 'Diagnosis' books. The 'reference' is invaluable for the current system reference and 'tools&service aids' tells you a lot about sadumps, dumps, c/traces. The 'component reference' part of the reference manual shows quite a few of the reports that IPCS can produce. Of course, you need to learn what report shows which areas. Get your hands on any SHARE presentation that deals with problem determination and with explanations about how z/OS works. You need to learn how to ask a dump the right question, and you can only do that if you have an inkling what happens when you see certain messages. And finally practise, practise, practise. Write a small Assembler program and then debug it using IPCS (and not an interactive debugger). Become familiar with save areas and how to find them in the dump, including when some code suddenly tells you F1SA for a pointer. Unfortunately I am not aware of any classes where you can learn IPCS. I learned on-the-job, watching an old-timer using IPCS in command mode (not using the analysis panels). And I had several years of practise, including code reading when I was IBM level 2 for the BCP. Barbara ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
