STL Time Machine Report #38 - Tuesday 02 February 1999 (1999-02-02) I just learned the Time Machine will be closed for four weeks next April, so we can upgrade it with our last 1999 application release and retest it. It looks like there will be a total freeze on project implementations after July, 1999, so we can be stable going into rollover. We didn't test 09/09/99. Basically, we couldn't find this as a signal date in our files or programs. We had a more urgent need to test 1999-07-05 for known problems with record purges and to verify that we could correctly handle Daylight Savings Time. THE WINTER OF "THE SUMMER OF UPGRADES" My experience "baby-sitting" the OS/390 2.5 installation was more like being a guard during a prison riot. We had some "Fix on Failure" type problems, schedules running late, some files corrupted temporarily. But no back-out, and OS/390 is now running in our contingency data center. They did take a scheduled IPL a week later to install some additional VTAM, SMS, and hypercache patches. My hope is that they've learned enough to make the OS/390 upgrade of the primary mainframes go much more smoothly. That was planned for late February, but now I hear they've found another third party product that won't work with OS/390. The replacement is on-line, but it will take another couple of months to migrate the last users off the old system. CICS 4.1 AND LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENT FOR MVS Last week I upgraded 18 test CICS regions to LE/MVS runtime libs. I still have 11 production CICS regions to upgrade. The target date hasn't been set yet, but will probably be mid-March at the earliest. Since they run 24X7, scheduling an outage for the production CICS regions is going to require a formal plan. This may sound like a lot of work, but it's been simplified to a few JCL changes and a down-and-up. The tricky part was getting the third party database package upgraded to LE/MVS first. Dave Eastabrook talked about mainframe complacency recently. It's something I worry about, but I just don't know if there's anything more we can do. Every two weeks we run the code through rollover, leap day, and rollover 2001. We synchronize all program changes into the Time Machine and test again. SIGNS? Down at the local CompUSA the other day I got to listen to a PeeCeeWeeNee telling me how bad Y2k would be. He said we would have Martial Law under the UN flag by October. New World Order, baby. And it didn't bother him, either. He was more concerned that he couldn't buy kerosene last month for his backup heat supply. All sold out. He's also ordering a wood burning stove for heating and cooking in his suburban home. He didn't trust banks to make it, nor the government to tell him the truth, either. He's trying to get his grown children interested and he's working with his church, too. He would have fit right in with comp.software.year-2000, and if he's ever heard of usenet, I couldn't find out. NEWSGROUP NOTES There was some recent discussion of DYL260 and DYL280. I remember DYL260 from another shop 15 years ago. It looked a lot like RPG to me. DYL280 looked more like EasyTrieve Plus, but I haven't heard much geek talk about fixing DYL and EasyTrieve. We still have not yet had a Y2k failure big enough to hit the mainstream news. I have no idea what's really going to happen, but if the lights go out, at least I can walk home. Frank Ney says our best and brightest coders are avoiding Y2K work like the plague. I'm sure this happens some places, and there's no question that it looks bad to have a failed project in your resume. Where I am Y2k work gets a lot of favorable recognition, even if it turns out to be another swine flu epidemic. Sorry I don't have any funny PHM stories this time. There's a lot of work to do right now, it's not all Y2k, and those meetings are making me yawn when I'd rather tickle my keyboard. As of 1999-02-02, my countdown now reads: 333 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!"