Okay, can you think of any possible drier, more boring subject for a SHARE session? Think really really hard; nothing comes to my mind just offhand. I came to this pitch expecting maybe a maximum of 50 people, and probably far less. I mean, how many people can possibly care about how you arrange your SYSRES datasets?

I was astounded. There were easily 250 persons in the audience, and probably more. It seems that everyone in the world has the same problems that we have with OS installations.

Because OS/390 is so large, it can no longer fit on a single DASD volume. This means that cloning your system, doing maintenance, installing replacement releases, and testing your efforts... isn't at all easy.

Gregory Daynes is from IBM Poughkeepsie, and his job responsibilities seem to have something to do with software manufacturing. I didn't get his job title, but he sure is authoritative. He knows a lot about ServerPac.

They gave us an exquisitely detailed handout, which consists of a series of "recommendations" for how to split your SYSRES, how to handle HFS maintenance (a subject of Kershaw Mehta's session 2860), the use of user catalogs, and more.

For sure we split our SYSRES wrong when we put up OS/390 release 3. We are ill-prepared to clone our system for maintenance, we have no established mechanism for putting Unix maintenance onto the HFS, we don't use system symbols, and we underutilize ICF user catalogs. It was all pretty depressing. We have a lot of work to do before we can put on the next release of OS/390 - or indeed, any maintenance.