We have been suffering for a long time with large PDSEs on EAVs spontaneously
'breaking' every couple/few weeks or months.
In June of last year, I opened PMR 31744,227,000 where I reported S0F4 RC24
failures in IGWDACND+1AFA at z/OS 1.11 base level. The recommended maintenance
was to apply the PTF for OA30338. That did not help.
Since then we have been hoping someone else would discover and fix the real,
underlying problem. [Wishful thinking.] It continued unchanged in z/OS 1.12.
When we saw the problem again under z/OS 1.13, I opened PMR 57302,227,000 to
report S0F4 RC24 failures in IGWBITX1+10F8.
This time the service folks pointed me to APAR OA37090. The PDSE development
team opened this APAR as follow up maintenance to OA30338. The newer APAR, like
OA30338, is an attempt to addresses errors associated with PDSE VDF index page
processing. The APAR error description reads:
"DIAGNOSTIC CODE TO TRAP WRITING OUT BAD PDSE DIRECTORY ENTRIES"
Clearly IBM is attempting to improve PDSE RAS to catch a corruption issue when
it actually occurs. Without such logic, it's the job that next uses the PDSE
that gets abended trying to use the broken PDSE. The APAR also resolves a code
issue that under certain circumstances allowed a page buffer to be discarded twice.
We have not seen more broken PDSEs since applying this service, but it's only
been two weeks since the IPL that made it active.
In any case, I'd like to suggest people install this service in the hope that it
will help YOU avoid the hassle of broken PDSEs and/or better enable the z/OS
community to assist IBM in tracking down some of these nagging PDSE problems.
PDSEs are required more and more every day. The sooner we get these issues
fixed, the better off we will all be.
--
Edward E Jaffe
Phoenix Software International, Inc
831 Parkview Drive North
El Segundo, CA 90245
310-338-0400 x318
[email protected]
http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/
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