Campus Computing News

Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic Computing Services, was so busy making campus computing news this month that he didn't have time to write a column. He'll be back next month to fill you in on what he -- and the University -- has been up to. Meanwhile, there are some important notices for mainframe users below. You can catch up on the computing news for last semester by reading past "Campus Computing News" columns in the archives. -- Editor

Academic Mainframe News

By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

Academic mainframe software maintenance is scheduled from 12/21/98 through 01/18/98. CMS may be unavailable for short periods of time during the maintenance process. If the system is required to be IPL'ed, users will receive a 30 minute notice. We anticipate that for the most part, the system will be generally available, but we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this software maintenance may cause.

Holiday Hours

The ISB 133 I/O station will be closed for the Christmas Holiday starting at 5:00 p.m., Thursday, December 24, 1998. The I/O station will reopen at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, December 27, 1998.

The ISB 133 I/O station will be closed for the New Year Holiday starting at 5:00 p.m., Thursday, December 31, 1998. The I/O station will reopen at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, January 2, 1999.

Academic Computing consultants will observe the staff holiday period which spans from December 24, 1998 through Jan. 3, 1999. ACS offices will reopen on Jan. 4, 1999.

Administrative Mainframe News

By Coy Hoggard, Senior Director of Administrative Computing and UNT's Year 2000 Compliance Officer

On December 25, 1998, the CPU operators will take full backups of the production data on the administrative mainframe. This includes the ADABAS data base files as well as other, non-ADABAS files. After this point, no further processing will be allowed against these files until the SIMS conversion has been completed. The production copies of COM-PLETE will be unavailable, and production batch processing will be stopped. The programming staff will begin working on moving the SIMS software into production on Saturday, December 26.

The purpose for the backup of all production data on December 25 is to provide us a fall-back position so that in a worst-case scenario we could restore all our data files to their December 25 status and resume processing, using the "unremediated" SIMS code. Although this is, in my opinion, a fairly remote possibility, it COULD happen. Anyone who applies updates to the production systems any time after December 25 should keep the forms, etc. that were used in those updates segregated so that if the files had to be restored to their December 25 status it would be possible to re-enter those items. This procedure should be followed for at least two days after we've returned to work after the holidays (January 4 and 5).

PLEASE NOTE !!:

Even though it is the Y2K Remediated SIMS applications that we'll be putting into production over the holidays, if something goes awry such that we have to restore the production files to their status as of December 25, then ALL mainframe-based administrative systems would be affected not just SIMS. So, users of HRMIS, GLAS (including NOBIS & TOBIS), CEATS, and other mainframe-based systems need to keep documents separate that have been used for updating these systems (either via on-line or batch processes) until at least the end of the day on January 5 so that these transactions could be re-applied if necessary. As previously stated, it's not likely that we will need to do that, but the purpose of taking the backup on December 25 is so that we COULD do that if we absolutely had to.