STL Time Machine Report #37 - Friday 15 January 1999 (1999-01-15) All dressed up and no place to go. Last week it was my turn to carry all three beepers and the cellphone, and it was during the worst snow and ice storm here in two years. This time there was an actual abend in the Time Machine. Unfortunately, they had the wrong beeper number so I never heard about it. A CICS region in the Time Machine was unable to open an empty VSAM file. Why was the VSAM file empty? Because there was no data in it following the daily purge. The VSAM file problem was fixed by adding a test job to the schedule that ensures at least one record is always loaded to the file. There was some good news. The Time Machine was upgraded from MVS/ESA 5.2.2 to OS/390 2.5 on December 26th, and the only real problem was SAS required an upgrade to work with it. This weekend we're upgrading the contingency production site to OS/390 (I get to help baby-sit) and in March we start upgrading the main complex. It looks like I get to write the implementation plan for adding LE/MVS to CICS 4.1. I found a new Y2k bug, sort of. We're starting to use a Windows hosted problem tracking package, so I got into it to familiarize myself, and it locked up viewing a bug report dated "98YY-10-03" and it wouldn't let me out. So I cancel the task and call the help desk. A sweet young thing comes by in a few minutes and is totally mystified. She says she's never seen it before and tells me to call PC support. So I call them, and another callow youth comes by a half-hour later. It turns out that I have set NT 4.0 to use ISO-8601 date format which is YYYY-MM-DD. Windows doesn't seem to mind it much, but it hoses the problem-tracking application bigtime. Support says don't use non-standard date formats. And a quick test shows it works fine with MM/DD/YY or MM/DD/YYYY format. But there's no support for DD/MM/YY or DD/MM/YYYY. Tough luck for Europeans. "But it's not ISO-8601 compliant!" I whine. All they tell me is, don't screw with Windows control panel. NEWSGROUP NOTES Meanwhile, there seems to be a decline in reports of '99 problems in comp.software.year-2000. The ones we've actually heard about aren't critical, which might be good news. I'm sure there are more problems we haven't heard of yet, but I'm still waiting for a critical failure that cannot be covered up. Until then, I'm feeling more confident that most Y2k problems won't be life threatening. Even the launch of the Euro seems to be without obvious system failures, apart from rioting in France. -flw- told us "Banks will fall from the sky." Flint wonders when we'll start to fix windowing. That of course implies we survive TEOTWAWKI only be killed off in 2050 by the COBOL bugs we are installing now. The NERC report generated a lot of discussion, simultaneously proving both the pollyanna case and the doombrooders' worst fears. In bit.listserv.ibm-main Rex Widmer is advising mainframe shops to power down their big iron rather than risk running across the rollover. We've had two more posts asking if February, 2000, will have 30 days instead of 28. No, no, no, no, no! February 2000 still has 29 days. Not one day more or one day less. Gold still hasn't taken off, Brazil is tanking like everyone expected, stocks are shaky, POTUS and Microsoft are still on trial, and c.s.y2k hit 700 new posts in one day this past week. Pretty soon it's going to start getting interesting. IT'S A DILBERT WORLD (Another Chapter) My buddy still can't get his hands on the latest Y2k audit, but it looks more and more like his horn-hair CIO is about to be "pursuing other opportunities". The application folks are finally starting to fix code in spite of every effort by management to prevent them. They've even found a bug in VSE/POWER that prevents deleting anything with a date past '99. There's already an IBM patch available for it. THE "JO ANNE EFFECT" It's still a good time to be watching out for "Jo Anne Effect" problems. If you're not familiar with JAE, here's the link to it on Pam Hystad's FAQ: http://www.computerpro.com/~phystad/jae.html And here's where you can find all of Pam's excellent Unofficial Smallish c.s.y2k FAQ: http://www.computerpro.com/~phystad/csy2kfaq.html As of 1999-01-15, my countdown now reads: 351 days until 2000-01-01 (Rollover) Previous Year 2000 Time Machine Reports are available at: http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/tmr.htm STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I am NOT an official corporate spokesperson. My opinions should not be held against my benevolent employer. -- Arnold Trembley http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/ "Y2K? Because Centuries Happen!"