Mico Monitionem
I know the following “FLASH” warning can hardly compete with the recent news stories about the election in the United States, but it is quite important for anyone applying maintenance to any release of TWSZ, IWSZ, or ZWS. Those of you who subscribe for IBM notifications for this product should have received an update about this on November 6th. Here is the URL in case you did not receive it:
FLASH: All HIPERs should be applied when upgrading maintenance for IWSZ or zWS
This should not be news to anyone, but lately we have seen that if you arbitrarily upgrade to some RSU or PUT level WITHOUT applying all the HIPERs, you may actually CAUSE problems to occur that you would not have seen otherwise. In general you would be better off to stay on whatever maintenance level you have, then to apply maintenance and leave out HIPER PTFs. Please keep this in mind if you are going to upgrade maintenance before starting any year end “maintenance freeze” situations.
Speaking of HIPERs, there should soon be some additional HIPER APARs added. I am just waiting on final confirmation that the following APARs need to have the HIPER designation. You may want to ensure that you have the PTFs for the following APARs applied even if they do not show up in the enhanced HOLDDATA as HIPER for a few more days:
APAR = PH13127 ABEND S0C4-10 IN CONTROLLER WHEN USING DWC SHOW PLAN VIEW WITH A DATE RANGE AND PREDECESSOR AND SUCCESSOR BOXES ARE CHECKED
APAR = PH21898 CONTROLLER TASK ABEND CODE=0C1
APAR = PH21994 ABEND 0C4 IN EQQDNTOP (NEW CURRENT PLAN) WITH DATASPACE (CPDATASPACE) ENABLED.
APAR = PH24048 MONITORING ALERT BUFFERS NOT FREED CAUSING 878 ABEND
APAR = PH25486 SYSTEM ABEND 0C4 IN EQQEMEVH+ X’808A’
APAR = PH26431 ABEND 0C4 ON SERVER WHEN EXECUTING TWICE STEP RESTART BY USING DWC
APAR = PH26567 ABEND S0C7 IN EQQDNTOP
APAR = PH30866 EQQG004E SUBTASK GS EXECUTOR 01 ABENDED MESSAGE IN THE CONTROLLER WHEN TRYING TO INSERT A CP OPERATION
Finally (unlike a politician I am going to keep this update as short as possible), the late major update for the year 2020 is going to be the SPE 9503 (SPE 3 for the 9.5 release) which should be available in late December along with 9.5 Fix Pack3 for the distributed workload scheduler and DWC. There is already an APAR open for this: PH30466.
For those of your who are already using the “zliberty” (Z/OS Liberty) version of the Dynamic Workload Console (DWC) or who are considering trying it (maybe in a test environment while your “production” environments are under a code freeze), be aware that the minimum level of zliberty for this new SPE 9503 will be 20.0.0.10 (October 2020).
I plan to publish the last Cy’s Corner for 2020 (or the first one for 2021) in late December or early January. There should be more information about SPE 9503, plus more information about BLOGs, RFEs, technotes, and more in that edition.
Meanwhile stay safe, keep attending the virtual ASAP presentations, and keep in touch. If you don’t have any need to open a case for an issue, feel free to drop me an email at stephen.viola@hcl.com.
Just allow some time for a response as I make an effort to prioritize working on cases over email.
