Date:     May 5, 1997         Time:    3:01 PM
From:     Jerry Lawson
          The Hartford Insurance Group
          (860) 547-2960           jlawson AT thehartford DOT com
After having installed MVS Level 12, and gone through a tape drive crisis, I
found some things happening that seemed very strange.... I checked the
Samplib ANR2210 member for the documentation on the new ANR5373 message, and
have some questions...

First the documentation says that this message will be issued after the
dynamic allocation processes have retried the allocation for 300 seconds.
And sure enough, we have seen this message come out.  However, in reading the
text further, it states that if the operator replies "R", and still no drives
are available, then we will receive an IEF238D - the dreaded Allocation
Recovery message.  However, we do not receive this message - I believe in
part because we are a JES3 shop, and all tape drives that are available are
online to both JES3 and MVS.  What I do see an awful lot of are IKJ56241I
messages, indicating that no devices are available.  Is this normal for a
JES3 environment?

The situation we found ourselves in last week was one which included no
reserve of drives available when we went through our month end closing
process - drives would turn over, but there was usually a wait for one.  We
had several tasks that seemed to be "dead", although other processes would
come in, request tapes, and receive mounts.  There was no obvious enqueue on
SYSZTIOT that was holding up ADSM itself.  However, when we tried to take
ADSM down, it would no come down cleanly - it had to be cancelled.

Anyone seen anything similar?  Any suggestions from IBM


                                         Jerry

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over..and expecting the results to
be different - Anon.