The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
m...@mentor-services.com (Mike Myers) writes: > Back in the '60s, the Field Engineering Division took over first-level > support of OS/360, creating a new kind of Customer Engineer called a > Program Support Representative (PSR). Their primary role was to > examine a dump and determine if the problem was hardware or software > related. If hardware, they would turn it over to a hardware customer > engineer. If software, then they could attempt to fix or bypass the > issue with a zap, if feasible. If not, then they would report it to > development and try to work a temporary fix. in the very early days of REX (before it was renamed and released to customers) ... I wanted to demonstrate that it wasn't just another pretty scripting language. I selected that I would redo the (implemented in large number of assembler LOCS) IPCS dump reader ... taking less than six weeks of my time in under three months ... it would have ten times the function and run ten times faster (some slight of hand to make the rex implementation doing ten times the function, run ten times faster than the assembler). part of the effort was gather signatures of failure modes ... and build a library of automated scripts that would examine dumps for all known, recognizable failure mode signatures. I also made it capable of running against the live kernel as well as patching kernel storage. For some reason I was never able to get it released as replacement for the standard product ... but at one point nearly all internal datacenters and PSRs were using it. Getting tired of waiting to get approval for it to ever be released, I managed to get a presentation approved for BAYBUNCH ... where I went in detail on how I did the implementation. Within three months after that presentation ... there were at least two other implementations. misc. past posts mentioning DUMPRX. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dumprx -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
