Sorry for a war story on Wednesday, but it's too good to suppress. We implemented the ICEGENER strategy at a former shop in the 80s. What could go wrong? Seems that some (of course critical) application was creating a sequential file in which the actual number of blocks was calculated. File was created on DASD and IEBGENERed to tape. The JCL that created the tape file did not code BLKSIZE; just depended on IEBGENER's habit of copying input DCB to output. You've all seen the warning message.
File was later read in by another program that expected the original number of blocks. But ICEGENER had already stepped in to help out by reblocking the file to SDB. Good for tape usage; fatal for the program that expected a set number of blocks. 30 years later I still shake my head over that one. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2018 10:18 AM To: [email protected] Subject: (External):Re: Replaceing IEBGENER I don't agree. It's simple to refer directly to the program that you want. Adding an IEBGENER alias to ICEGENER runs the risk of someone hitting a subtle incompatibility at 0'dark hundred in a job that was never tested with ICEGENER. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Brian Westerman <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2018 2:24 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Replaceing IEBGENER If you have DFSort or Syncsort then replacing IEBGENER with ICEGENER or SYNCGENR is not only simple, but you would be silly not to do so and save the resources. FASTGENR is also very good, but I don't think (in my opinion) that it's worth the extra cost since you already paid for either SYNCGENR or ICEGENER. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
