Spent the morning adding an extra tweak to my tape automation tool for mvs3.8j.
As you all know by know, it there were no scratch tapes left in the pool the a WTOR is posted on the consoles asking the operators to specify a tape volume to be used, or reply cancel to the automated tape mount.
The extra tweak I added is now that if anyone replies cancel to the specify a tape volume prompt TAPEMAN3 will now also issue a console command (via SVC34) to cancel the batch job that was requesting the tape mount.
Or simply put in the past I would cancel a mount and clean up later. Now TAPEMAN3 is coded to assume there will be no manual actions later; and if the reply to the WTOR is cancel then it wil as well as cancelling automation for the mount cancel the batch job that triggered it.
Saving me an entire one(1) command of up to 10 bytes from having to be entered.
Was it worth spending a few hours coding ?, well yes. If I’m going to automate tape mounts I should automate the cancel as well. Just a minor cosmetic change in function but sensible.
And besides, it only took a few hours to code because I forgot in mvs3.8j if you assemble a new module into a linklisted library you can compress libraries until hell freezes over, but it will not pick up any new version of a program until you delete the old version first (or in this case when I figured it out delete any existing version, so the directory has absolutely no pointers to any version), then assemble in the new version and compress. The actual code changes took about 10 minutes including testing, the hours were spent trying to get the system to ‘see’ the new program and stop running the old one.
What I have learn’t from this. I need to do more 370/asm coding. I knew you had to delete the old version first; well I did about 6mths ago when I last updated, but I forgot that trick since then.
So less time on paid work and more time playing at home ??, yeah I can see that going down well with the boss. There will probably be another post in 6mths time saying I had trouble getting a new module recognized because I forgot again.
