One way as a software vendor we deal with this issue (we develop, among other items IMS utilities) is a confidential image copy, in which all of the data is optionally converted to binary zeroes. The customer can then ship the confidential image copy, and we can re-create the problem here with the same version of the code, and the issue vanishes.
Re-creation is important to us as we can add it to the regression test suite and validate that the problem has been corrected before shipping customer a fix or work-around. A second method is to place as much information as possible about an abend in the joblog so that the problem can be resolved without the dump. Such items include the usual load module and CSECT name and offset, assembly date and time, maintenance applied, options in effect, etc. This has resulted in faster and more accurate problem diagnosis than the svc dump. A third method is embedded traces which show internal, not customer information, which can be output to SYSOUT data sets. Of course, there will always be the issue that is not resolved by one of these or other similar methods, but they are rare these days. Proactive design of embedded diagnostic tools is a big step forward in avoiding dumps. Tom Harper IMS Utilities Development Team NEON Enterprise Software Steve Thompson wrote: If you sanitize a dump you might find that you have killed information that the support persons might need. Suppose that you are running some product that has an encryption function and it fails. If you sanitize that dump, removing all the clear text, it may become impossible for the support people to figure out what was so special with your data that their code crashed. And if you are taking the IPCS type data (SVC DUMP and / or SYSMDUMP) and sanitizing it, IPCS may not function. That is, the support people may not be able to get IPCS to initialize your dump so that it can be read. Perhaps support contracts need to be reviewed to ensure that both parties (customer and vendor) are doing things that will comply with (whatever alphabet soup you want for secure data legislation that applies on whatever continent you are on/in). Regards, Steve Thompson ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
