After an IPL, the default for message handling is "manual deleting"; all messages remain on the MVS console screen until the operator issues a command to delete them. A more usable solution is to have MVS automatically scroll (delete) older messages that do not require operator response in order to make room for newer messages. In the MVS command input area, type the command:
k s
which will cause MVS to echo to the command input area the command:
K S,DEL=N,SEG=09,CON=Y,RNUM=19,RTME=046
Change DEL=N to DEL=RD (specifies that messages not requiring operator action are to be automatically rolled off the console screen), CON=Y to CON=N (cancel conversational message deletion), and RTME=046 to RTME=001 (set the interval between message updating to 1 second), and press ENTER to set the new parameters in effect.
[July 2020] If you are using an MVS system built following my instructions/tutorial to build an MVS 3.8j system, you can simply press Program Function Key 12 to set Roll Delete mode on the console.
You can set any of the Program Function Keys to valid MVS console commands, so that frequently used commands may be entered simply by pressing the appropriate Program Function Key. The command:
K N,PFK=(n,CMD='command text'),CON=N
where n specifies the PFKey number (1, 2, 3, ... 12) and command text specifies the command to be sent to MVS when the PFKey is pressed (the single quotation marks are required). The PFKey settings will persist from IPL to IPL, so it is not necessary to set the same PFKey again unless you wish to assign a different command text to it.
To display the current settings, use the command:
D PFK
You can also use the program SETPFKEY to set your console Program Function Keys at IPL time. An MVS system built using my instructions/tutorial will have this program already installed and a member of SYS1.PARMLIB (SETPFK00) contains the settings for the console PF keys.
To display all DASD volumes currently offline (which will include the device addresses where DASD may be mounted), use the command:
d u,dasd,offline
The display you will receive will be similar to:
To display all DASD volumes currently online, use the command:
d u,dasd,online
The display you will receive will be similar to:
Under STATUS, the values that may appear are: O (online), S (system, or IPL volume), or A (active). The values that may appear under VOLSTATE relate to the entries coded in the VATLST or that were entered when the MOUNT command was issued; the first value may be: PUB (public), PRIV (private), or STRG (storage); the second value may be RSERV (reserved), or RSDNT (permanently resident).
To display all TAPE volumes, use the command:
d u,tape,online
The display you will receive will be similar to:
Under STATUS, the values that may appear are: O (online), or OFFLINE (offline, of course). The values that appear under VOLSER and VOLSTATE are shown only for units on which AWS tape volumes are mounted and are derived from the entries in JCL and the tape VOL1 label.
The above commands will probably yield several pages of output, with the entries displayed in ascending UNIT address order. To display the next page of output, use the command:
k d,f
To terminate the display and erase the area the output occupied, use the command:
k e,d
Volker Bandke has put together a great list of this and other MVS console and JES2 commands at http: //www.bsp-gmbh.com/hercules/oscmds.html. [July 2020] It was reported that Volker Bandke's hosting and/or domain registration has expired, so I have recovered this content and created a pdf containing it at ../downloads/pdf/Volker Bandke Command Summaries.pdf.
Answers supplied by Phil Roberts and Jack Schudel in the Hercules MVS forum:
r 00,dump to produce a system dump r 00,snap to produce a snap dump r 00,purge
r 00,exitto shutdown JES2
You must connect a tn3270 client to each of the terminal addresses that you intend to use for VTAM/TSO prior to IPL, or you may experience this. Also, sometimes after logging off a TSO session, VTAM will "lose" the terminal. Either of these is indicated if you do not see the Network Solicitor message on the terminal:
THIS TERMINAL IS LOGGED ON TO THE NETWORK SOLICITOR
On the MVS console, enter these two commands:
v net,inact,id=cuu0cx
v net,act,id=cuu0cx
substituting the correct last digit of the terminal's hardware address for the x. The terminal should then show the Network Solicitor message and be available to log on to TSO.
This message is issued whenever JES2 is approaching 100% utilization of one of its resources and may be one of several. The particular resource is indicated in the text of the message, such as:
JQE - Job Queue Elements
JOE - Job Output Elements
SMFB - System Management Facilities buffers
It is not a good idea to allow JES2 to completely exhaust resources, as that will often result in a deadlock situation, i.e.. the shortage will prevent you from resolving the shortage and your only recourse is to re-start JES2 with a cold-start, losing any jobs that are in process.
The amount of each of JES2 resources to provide is specified in the JES2 parameters, which is in the SYS1.PARMLIB(JES2PM00) if you have built your system utilizing my instructions. To verify the location of your JES2 parameters, locate the HASPPARM DD statement in the JES2 procedure in SYS1.PROCLIB, which points to the location of the active JES2PARM.
Edit the member, either with TSO edit or with IEBUPDTE, to increase the allocation for the resource which is nearing full utilization and cycle JES2 - shut down JES2 and restart it.
You can immediately alleviate the shortage in JQE and JOE by purging some of the jobs from the queue. Use the $DN, $DF, or $DP commands to view jobs awaiting output and then use $P to purge unneeded jobs. You can also use the QUEUE command under TSO to review and selectively delete jobs from the queue.
To delete all output from TSO User sessions, enter $PT1-9999. To delete all output from started tasks, enter $PS1-9999. If you are sure there is no batch job output on the queue that you need, you can delete all output from batch jobs by entering $PJ1-9999.
This fairly nasty looking message is issued following the entry of the z eod command on the MVS console and is the result of the IEFU29 user exit being applied to the system. The short explanation is that the exit is attempting to start a job in the background but since the system has just been shut down (z eod is the command issued to initiate an orderly system shutdown at end of shift/workday/etc) the job cannot allocate needed resources. There is no way to prevent this message and have the advantages the user exit provides, so the only recourse is to cringe and ignore the message. No harm will be done and no data will be lost. On the next IPL, SMF will continue to write new records into the same dataset. When the dataset does fill up, the SMF dataset switch will be performed, the system won't be in the process of shutting down, and the job will run to save the SMF data properly. You can read more about the IEFU29.
Update 08/2004 - There is a fix for this that is applied to the code for IEFU29 now available at the IEFU29 link.
It means that there are so many console messages pending that 80% of the buffers allocated for Write To Operator messages are in use. It is doubtful that you could have operated MVS with messages pending on the master console (the 3270 attached to device address 010) long enough to fill 80% of the buffers, so a good assumption is that the alternate console has not be set up to roll delete messages not requiring attention. Switch to the tn3270 client attached to the alternate console (device address 011) and press the PFKey to which you assigned the command to set the message display to roll delete.
If you continue submitting jobs without attending to this right away, you could find the system halted because all of its WTO buffers are full.
Sometime around version 3.00 of Hercules, the behavior of tape devices under MVS changed. Tape devices defined in the configuration file were marked as "offline" by MVS 3.8j during IPL. The first time a job requires a tape device, in a series of messages will be displayed similar to this:
IEF244I TAPEMAP TAPEMAP - UNABLE TO ALLOCATE 1 UNIT(S) AT LEAST 1 OFFLINE UNIT(S) NEEDED. IEF489I TAPEMAP - 1 UNIT(S) NEEDED FOR SYSUT1 IEF247I TAPEMAP - 310,311,312,313,314,315,316,317 OFFLINE *03 IEF238D TAPEMAP - REPLY DEVICE NAME OR 'CANCEL'.
Of course, you can resolve this by issuing a VARY command to bring one (or more) of the configured tape drives online and then respond to the outstanding message with the address of the now available drives. In fact, you can simply respond to the outstanding message with the address of an offline, but otherwise available, drive. A more practical solution is to setup your MVS initialization to bring the configured drives online at IPL automatically.
There are two places the commands to accomplish this task may be placed.
The first is the COMMND?? member of SYS1.PARMLIB. If you do not already have this member set up, you will need to edit two members of the SYS1.PARMLIB partitioned dataset. The member IEASYS00 needs to contain a line pointing to the COMMND?? member:
CMD=00, AUTO COMMANDS: COMMND00
CMD=00 specifies that the command member suffix is 00, resulting in the full name of the command member: COMMND00. Note the comma, which indicates that there are additional commands following this one in the IEASYS00 member. During IPL, lines are processed from this member until a line is encountered which is not terminated with a comma, so you must be careful in editing the IEASYS00 member to avoid having an MVS that will not IPL. Everything following the space after the comma is treated as a comment. If you already have a CMD= statement in your IEASYS00, all you need do is edit the existing COMMND?? member, adding your commands to any already existing.
Create (or edit) the COMMND?? member pointed to from the IEASYS00 member and insert a VARY command:
COM='VARY (310,311),ONLINE'
inserting the address of one or more tape drives defined in your configuration file between the parentheses. In my system, the two tape drives I have defined are 310 and 311, as shown in the VARY command above.
The second place that the VARY command may be placed, and the one I prefer, is in the JES2 parameters. Locate the JES2 parameter file being utilized by your system. To ensure that you edit the active set of parameters, look at the JES2 member in SYS1.PROCLIB and locate the dataset name in the HASPPARM DD statement. That is the dataset, and member, you need to edit. On my system, it is the JES2PM00 member of SYS1.PARMLIB. Locate the automatic operator commands, which are usually segregated together near the end of the member. Insert a VARY command:
$VS,'V (310,311),ONLINE'
again substituting the address(es) of your defined tape drives in the command.
Once you set up this automatic command, your tape drives will be online following each IPL.
Grzes Plucinski has written a program to do this - content of original message on Yahoo Hercules' message forum:
You will need to complete four steps to implement this on your system:
Here is an IEBCOPY jobstream that will restore the load module to SYS2.LINKLIB (if you don't have SYS2.LINKLIB defined, you may alter the JCL to use SYS1.LINKLIB):
Here is an IEBUPDTE jobstream that will catalog the procedure to execute the HERCCMD program as a Started Task from the MVS console:
You need to add a line to your Hercules' configuration file to enable DIAG 8 commands:
DIAG8CMD ENABLE
You should also be aware of the security ramifications of enabling this feature of Hercules:
DIAG8CMD disable/enable
When set to enable, commands issued through diagnose 8 will be executed by hercules as hercules commands. When set to disable, commands issued through the diagnose 8 interface will be ignored. The default is disable. Note that when this feature is enabled, systems running under hercules can even issue host commands through the hercules sh command. Enabling this feature may have security consequences.
An example of the use of the command - when a tape mount is requested, you can issue an MVS Start command to execute the catalogued procedure to send a devinit command to Hercules:
