STL Time Machine Report #45 - Friday 21 May 1999 (1999-05-21) The STL Y2k'ers gathered at Krieger's on Friday, May 14th. It was a small group, Steven Burkett couldn't make it, but Tim Oxler, Eric Buckley, and Steve Dover showed up, plus some new faces. We traded stories and speculated on the outcomes. Steve Dover was smoking even more than me. He and I agreed that -bks- was way off topic posting technical information about UNIX RCS in csy2k. Steve sat way over on the other side so I couldn't always hear him, but he still nabbed my french fries. Tim says we're in the doldrums. Nobody's hiring right now, and it appears to be due to Y2k lockdowns. Eric's doing some Y2k work at a different contract. Everyone who's actually working on Y2k projects is making progress. A few of us are working overtime. I heard of at least one more local company running a full-blown mainframe Time Machine, but I'm not allowed to say who. Meanwhile, Time Machine testing is coming along nicely. And apart from the usual setup problems getting in, they're not finding any new date problems. From talking to sysprogs at other companies, and looking at bit.listserv.ibm-main, my best guess is that thousands of big iron mainframe shops are running Time Machines now. CICS 4.1 AND LE/MVS Back in March, we attempted to upgrade our third-party database to the Language Environment for MVS version. They had to back it out after three days because a couple of batch jobs had their wall clock runtimes double. Everything worked, but not everything worked fast enough. A performance enhancement was tested for several weeks and finally installed last Saturday. This one is staying in. This week, I upgraded the last eight CICS 4.1 regions to LE/MVS. I couldn't do that until the database was upgraded. This is the last system software upgrades hurdle and now it's done. That's a huge relief to me. I haven't heard any more on the upgrades to our Unix network boxes, but it looks like they will be finished in early June, so there's nothing else left to do except for testing with external customers and polishing up our contingency plans. We'll be monitoring our first critical date on July 5th. I don't know what my contingency schedule will be yet, but it's not guaranteed that I will get the rollover shift. Oh, Please, please, can I have it, please? Maybe they'll give it to me. DC Y2K WEATHER REPORT #119 Brett already posted it, and I'll probably throw a copy on my website. Cory challenged anyone with an Enterprise Systems background to take a pollyanna view. I'm cautiously optimistic that the actual rollover won't be as bad as our worst fears. That's my best guess. If you feel better preparing for three months, six months, or longer, then go for it. Food supplies are plentiful right now. If things take a turn for the worse, it might be harder to stock up near the end of the year. I still say keeping the systems running is the best option. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. As of 1999-05-21, my countdown now reads: 45 days until 1999-07-05 (First Fail Date) 111 days until 1999-09-09 (Another date) 225 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!"