On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 3:03 AM, Brian Westerman <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm actually kind of surprised at the number of sites that don't code the
> OSA-ICC consoles as NIP available.  They were designed to function in that
> manner, and you can then always have remote access (assuming you have a
> VPN).  If you don't have a VPN set up for your mainframe, you are just
> asking for trouble.  If you do have one, then not using it to support the
> box seems very silly indeed.
>

​We don't have a real VPN here. We used to. But we now use MS Terminal
Services Gateway. Basically that means your Windows (Linux & OSX cannot be
used) home machine will do a "mstsc" (remote terminal) connection to your
work desktop via the Terminal Services Gateway machine. This isolates your
home machine from the work LAN entirely. The bad part is that if your work
PC is down (say due to a transient power hit), you can't get logged in to
the system at all. Somebody needs to go into the office and power up your
machine for you. And the office is abandoned starting at 16:59:59.9999
every work day. There is normally nobody here at night or on the weekends.​



>
> Setting up a separate PC (unless your box doesn't support the ICC
> consoles) is really not necessary.
>

​Actually, I'm likely in the small minority (perhaps of 1) who really likes
having _no_ NIPCONs at all. I actually _prefer_ to IPL via the "System
Messages" interface on the HMC. ​For a console session, I just use SMCS. I
wanted to use an OSA-ICC. And I even have an "extra" OSA handy. But the LAN
people just didn't want to be bothered to hook it into _their_ LAN. They
were running short of ports on the switches. And this place is, uh,
"frugal". I.e. they won't buy anything new until something critical is near
failing (or actually has failed). They just want _out_ of the "I.T.
business" entirely. I would guess that in another 2-3 years, the I.T.
department will be the CIO and maybe an assistant to who manage the
interaction with the outsourcer. I'm not too sure about local "desktop
support". That may remain in house. Or maybe there are companies which do
that too.


> Brian
>

-- 
Heisenberg may have been here.

Unicode: http://xkcd.com/1726/

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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