Academic Mainframe Items of Interest

        By Cathy Hardy, Academic Database Consultant (AC55@vm.acs.unt.edu)

        J2

        Ever wondered where that job you submitted to Academic MVS (from CMS) went? Did you think it just went to the great bit bucket in the sky? Check the MVS queue with J2, the CMS interface to the Academic MVS system.

        The trick here is to use the current UNT job naming convention in your job as J2 will only let you see jobs whose name begins with the first 4 characters of your logon User-ID. Coincidentally, your MVS User-ID just happens to be 4 characters! If your User-ID is xxnn, the jobcard begins with //xxnn or //xxnnpgm, for example.

        After your job has been submitted you can check it on the MVS queue. At the CMS Ready prompt, type J2 and any jobs you have on the MVS queue (input, output, waiting to spool to a printer) will magically appear. If it's MIA (missing in action, in the bit bucket in the sky, etc. (insert your favorite euphemism here), you can list the job and see why it didn't run.

        Usually at the beginning of a semester we see quite a few jobs in limbo because of a problem in the jobcard. When MVS finds a problem in a jobcard, it stops. So it never gets to the route cards to get the job back to CMS and the user is perplexed. It's magic - the job is submitted, then disappears!

        MVS/ESA

        In July, 1995, UNT received a new IBM 9672-R51 mainframe and Academic computing moved off the HDS 8083 to share the 9672 with Administrative Computing. When we moved, we were able to go from a VM/XA operating system to VM/ESA and a new version of CMS. Working around the semester schedule, we will bid a (fond?) farewell to MVS/SP at the end of this semester and welcome MVS/ESA1.

        We try to keep all version and maintenance levels of Academic software as equal as possible across systems on the mainframe for users. Since some of the newer versions of software are not able to run on MVS/SP, things have been held up. For example, when we convert to MVS/ESA, we'll be upgrading SAS (to 6.08 on MVS) and then we'll bring the SAS level on CMS up to match.

        One thing CMS users have already noticed with VM/ESA is that all CMS virtual machines have 4 meg of storage instead of the 2 meg of storage machines had in the past.

        To keep up with our progress, don't fly by the logon message when you come into CMS. It only takes a second to read and then you'll know our progress. As we go, log messages will be updated.

        1 Currently scheduled for May 16-21. A VM/CMS system upgrade (to VM/ESA version 2.1.0) is scheduled for May 22-29.

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