People have been speaking of self-healing networks for years, and we can all retire if they ever reach the real world. In the meantime, network administrators are still hunting for tools that tell them what is going on in the network so they can solve those problems themselves. One old standby which is often underutilized is NetFlow.  read more »

In days of yore, disaster recovery (DR) meant offsite backup tapes. But when it came time to restore that data, some companies found it could take days, weeks or even an eternity to recover the systems - in the common event that tape backups proved incomplete or faulty.

Enter a wide range of snapshot, replication, mirroring and disk-based backup technologies to speed the time required for recovery as expressed in what is known as recovery time objective (RTO) i.e. how long it would take to have systems back up and running.  read more »

COBOL source code migration is inevitable. In the near future, whether your site has VS COBOL II programs or still has OS/VS COBOL programs, if you change your source code during maintenance, you must migrate the compiler to Enterprise COBOL.  read more »

There's a general question when dealing with any operating system, and especially when dealing with MVS in any of its forms (z/OS, OS/390, and further back). That is: We know there is much information about the general well-being and the operating particulars of the system stored in the many control blocks and control areas of the system. But that information remains hidden from us, unless there's some way for us to display it clearly. How can we get to the information?
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Planning a Datacenter Migration

Moving your IT operation to a new datacenter is an enormous and intimidating proposition. Whether you are moving from one in-house location to another or plan on outsourcing your datacenter to a third-party hosting facility, planning and preparation are key to a smooth and successful transition.  read more »

This fall, comedian Drew Carey took over from Bob Barker as hosting The Price is Right, a show that has aired fairly steadily since 1956 in the U.S. with local versions produced in 30 other countries. While contestants on that show have to guess at the correct price for different products, when it comes to software, the "Right Price" is often zero: Linux runs on everything from mainframes to mobile phones; Snort is the most widely used Intrusion Detection System (IDS) software; and Open Office is
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Disaster recovery (DR) can be really expensive these days. Think about having a mirror site at a remote location. Every single server, disk array, SAN fabric component, and networking box is duplicated at the DR facility. Expensive replication technology is used to write data simultaneously at both sites - and that takes an awful lot of high-priced bandwidth. Pretty soon, the budget has skyrocketed and plans have to be pared down.  read more »

Some of you may recall about a year ago, I introduced a new concept-the Disaster Recovery cheat sheet.  Think of it as "fast food" for your recovery plan.  The cheat sheet is intended to be a quick guide to some fast and inexpensive changes, updates or modifications you can make to your recovery plan in order to make it more resilient.   read more »

Every IT professional knows that a secure network requires strong passwords, and that there are some simple rules for creating strong passwords.

* Don't use words that are easy to guess

* Use a combination of numbers, letters and symbols

* Arrange the characters in a way you can remember  read more »

There comes a time in the career of a security professional when they have to meet with an auditor. When such a time comes, many see it as a daunting task, akin to going to a dentist.

They assume a defensive posture, and prepare to defend whatever challenges are brought forward. Such an attitude is neither healthy nor constructive, and in the end it is the security practitioner who suffers.       read more »

It is extremely useful, helpful, and often quite necessary, to be able to examine "live" system storage in the MVS (z/OS or any other flavor) machine that is currently running. There are many available tools to do that, and most of them are vendor products which not everyone has. But today, I want to concentrate on using one free tool to examine system storage. And this is a tool that anyone, in any MVS shop, can easily acquire. It is called LOOK, and it can be found on File 264 of the CBT MVS Utilities collection (www.cbttape.org).  read more »

Recently, a Washington State ferry service employee was searching for a new home for one of their ferries.  The employee utilized Google earth to zoom in on some potential sites and stumbled across a nuclear submarine with its propeller showing.  This is prohibited in military intelligence and sparked a wave of sensitivity over the use of mapping showing military bases.  However, there is a bigger story from this.  read more »

In my three decades in this business I have come across countless professional programmers.  Sadly I can count on one hand the programmers that really knew what they were doing.  During the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s when the programming revolution really got under way the demand for programmers far outstripped the supply.  There was a vacuum.  Immediately various technical schools began popping up promising to teach you to program in less than a year.  And indeed they did.  However, there is more to programming than
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The impact of services-oriented architecture (SOA) is just beginning to be felt in the batch world-and the challenges are clearly present. Batch legacy applications have been around for years, capably running the business. Now, initiatives like SOA are forcing new integration and interoperability requirements on batch processes that had comfortably been categorized as "untouchable." These processes have to interoperate with online and Web batch applications.  read more »

There are many possible "standards" by which we can judge the so-called "quality" of MVS system software. In order to sell some tool or product commercially, certain standards of reliability and usability have to be met, or else the users will not feel happy with the feel and results of the product, and they will not want to buy it. If their installation has already bought it, and the sysprogs don't like to use it, the sysprogs' opinion will surely be felt--a future recommendation will not be forthcoming. On the other hand, if the
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