IPL Reason

This is designed to be run from COMMND00 with a 's xxx' command at IPL time. It grabs information from the system control blocks to record the IPL time and details (see the log message format below) and also issues a WTOR for further information to be provided.

I use it to record the reasons I IPL'ed so I can keep track of what I did that broke the system... and also to keep track of how often (fortunately infrequently) the host system reboots and automatically re-IPLs my MVS38J system.

It requires my date/time utility program and macros in order to be assembled as those are used for date/time formatting; plus of course calculating the actual IPL time which requires a lot of fiddling about with control block timers of differing bit lengths (code like that goes in a library for re-use, so is not imbedded in the program source here; other than the library macro references).

Functionally

  1. ideally gets kicked off by COMMND00 each IPL
  2. collects various IPL related info from system control blocks
  3. issues a WTOR to allow further details to be entered
  4. if no reply is given to the WTOR in 10 minutes it is cancelled and a default "NO REPLY PROVIDED BY OPERATOR" reason is logged instead
    note: my linux rc3.d script to start hercules replies to the WTOR with a "started by host automation" so I can keep track of host reboots
  5. writes the log message to the IPL history log file
  6. WTO's a copy of the log message to the console also

Log message format

The message logged to the logfile (and also WTO'd to the console) is shown below. All information is collected from system control blocks. The IPL date/time will be the last IPL time (not the time you run the program) 

 LOG FILE RECORD CONTAINS...
 2013/07/10 09:14 WED MID1 MVSRES(0148) IPL=CVIO,TEST NONCLPA
      |       |    |    |       |           |    |
 yyyy/mm/dd   |    |    |       |           |    |
              |    |    |       |           |    |
            hh:mm  |    |       |           |    |
                   |    |       |           |    |
               day name |       |           |    |
                                |           |    operator response to
                   system smfid |           |    WTOR after comma
                                |           |    (up to 82 bytes)
                      ipl volser(ipl CCUU)  |    
                                            |    
                                       ipl type
                                 clpa/cvio(quick)/warm

Dowload link

The latest version of this program is available here as a text file. As always right click and save link as to get the file, when displayed in a browser any special characters are converted.
And as noted above it will not assemble without my date/time utility library, as there is a lot of heavy work involved in timestamp calculations so I am keeping all those in one place.

And as the log file grows forever here is a log roll job you should run every year or so, depending on how often you ipl.