No Y2K bugs in Innovation products were reported
over the New Millennium weekend.
However, there are 2 IBM Y2K APARs which describe problems which may affect
Innovation customers and cause loss of data:
1) Y2K Alert for all FDR, FDRABR, FDRSOS and FDR/UPSTREAM
Customers using IBM's DFSMSrmm for tape management:
Innovation has discovered a problem in DFSMSrmm when a tape contains files
with varying expirations and some of them are 99365 or 99366; such tapes
may be prematurely expired. IBM has opened Severity 1 HIPER APAR OW42560
for this Y2K problem in DFSMSrmm.
Normally, DFSMSrmm will set the expiration date of a multi-file tape to
the highest expiration of any file on the tape. For example, when a tape
contains files expiring on 1999/340, 2000/031 and 2000/012, the tape will
expire on January 31, 2000.
However, this does not work right when some of the files have permanent
retention dates (99365 or 99366) and other files on the same tape have
expiration dates of 1/1/2000 or beyond. DFSMSrmm will think that the non-permanent
expiration dates are higher than the 99365/99366 dates and assign the
highest of those dates as the tape expiration. For example, if files have
expirations of 99365, 2000.005 and 2000.010, the tape will expire on January
10, 2000.
Note that this is based on expiration date only. The tapes might have
been created long ago with expirations in the 21st century. For more information,
consult IBM APAR OW42560 or contact IBM. IBM plans to supply a report
to identify susceptible tapes. It is possible for FDRABR, FDRTSEL, FDR/UPSTREAM
and other Innovation functions to create such tapes. Also, tape stacking
software from other vendors may create such tapes. Innovation recommends
that all Innovation customers using DFSMSrmm apply the fix for APAR OW42560
as soon as possible.
2) Y2K Alert for FDR/ABR Customers using Archive:
IBM has opened HIPER APAR OW42558 for a Y2K problem in catalog processing
for GDGs. The problem occurs only when:
The GDG base has the SCRATCH option (delete old generations) The generation is SMS-managed The generation has an expiration date of 99365 or 99366 (permanent
retention) The generation has been archived by ABR (or migrated by DFSMShsm)
As new generations are created, these archived older
generations should be deleted by the SCRATCH option, unless they have
not reached their expiration date, in which case they are recataloged
as rolled-off. These permanent-retention data sets should be rolled-off.
However, the SCRATCH code did not have a proper test for permanent retention
(99365 or 99366), so the generations would be uncataloged. If you REORG
your Archive Control File with FDRARCH with the ENABLE=IFNOTCAT option,
FDRARCH will delete these generations from the control file since they
are no longer cataloged.
For more information, consult IBM APAR OW42558 or contact IBM.
Although we believe this will affect a small number of HSM and ABR
customers, all ABR customers should apply the IBM fix for this APAR.
If you have questions on either of the two problems above, or any other
Y2K questions involving Innovation products, please contact Innovation
by phone (973-890-7300) or email support@fdrinnovation.com
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