I have lonnnng advocated not just allowing but encouraging application folx to use IPCS. An eon ago--circa 1980--IPCS required READ access to SYS1.PARMLIB, which some shops/auditors viewed as an integrity exposure. That requirement has long since been lifted, but doubt that IPCS has morphed into a kitchen-drawer tool in many places. A few points.
-- In my current shop in the current century, obtaining a hardcopy SYSUDUMP would require executive intervention. We just don't massacre trees like that anymore. -- If you're going to read SYSUDUMP online anyway, then why not use IPCS? -- For application programmers, SYSMDUMP is probably the appropriate gist for IPCS, although some problems might require a SLIP dump to investigate. (I once had one of those; caused by a defective STAE routine that turned a routine S0C7 into a wholly implausible S0C4.) -- The moderne practice for system-level problems is to turn over dump analysis ASAP to the nearest smoking-gun vendor and let them figure it out. You can hardly do that for an abending COBOL program. (See STAE reference above.) -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2019 9:38 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: (External):Re: Description of the format of a SYSUDUMP I remember one such product that intercepted ABENDs and dropped diagnostic data that would otherwise have appeared on the dump. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Farley, Peter x23353 <peter.far...@broadridge.com> Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2019 11:57 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Description of the format of a SYSUDUMP All of which AssUMes that your local sysprog and security teams have deigned to make IPCS available to the ordinary application developer; not always the case I'm sad to report. I always liked and respected the DumpMaster ISV post-abend application debugging tool, but sadly I lost access to it a decade or more ago for $$$ reasons. The replacement product that was acquired (which I will not name to avoid flame wars and defamation suits) is wholly inadequate, buggy, and unreliable, at least as installed here. Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2019 11:39 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Description of the format of a SYSUDUMP Well, chacun à son goût; there's a lot that IPCS can format, and hand decoding from the hexadecimal storage dump is so 19th Century. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Thomas David Rivers <riv...@dignus.com> Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 1:40 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Description of the format of a SYSUDUMP Well - I've been reading SYSUDUMPs for a long time, but I've never found a pretty precise description of the various pieces of the dump. The newer z/OS doc seems to just want to point you to IPCS, but I rather like just reading the dump. My particular question is the LINES XXXXXXXX-YYYYYYYY SAME AS ABOVE in a memory dump. Does that mean the the single line (of 32-bytes) just before this line is copied as many times to fill in the space between XXXXXXXX and YYYYYYYY, or does it mean that all of the previously described memory (for as many bytes as needed) is copied? (I think it has to mean that the single line above is copied (YYYYYYYY-XXXXXXXX)/32 times... but - I'm just checking.) Seems like I recall, at some point, a pretty precise document on the format of a SYSUDUMP - but I can't seem to find it now... if anyone remembers what that might be a pointer to that would be welcome. - Many thanks! - - Dave Rivers - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
