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Setup Basics for IBM z/OS® Remote Access Programs

Proper planning now will enable future success should there be a need to move your data from the current guest z/OS system to a new one. It is important to follow these basic setup guidelines when using any ZRDP system. Some of these practices require the expertise of an experienced z/OS systems programmer, while information about others can be found in the User's Guide and Reference for IBM z/OS® Remote Access Programs.

  1. Be sure to circulate the delivery email to all those in your organization who will be using the guest z/OS system.

  2. Read the User's Guide and Reference for IBM z/OS® Remote Access Programs

  3. User data must reside ONLY on the user volumes listed in the user DASD Configuration section of the delivery email. For DB2, this means creating your own DB2 STOGROUP pointing to the user volume(s) and using this STOGROUP when creating DB2 databases and tablespaces. You could also ALTER STOGROUP SYSDEFLT to use one of your assigned volumes.

  4. The master catalog (MASTERV.CATALOG) should only contain entries for the guest z/OS base system and the products that come with it. This means no TSO user ID datasets or user application datasets are to reside in the master catalog. Aliases should be created in the master catalog pointing to user catalogs.

  5. IBM supplies a user catalog named CATALOG.USERAA. You could use this catalog for all of the data sets you create in your system. However, you should also consider creating your own user catalogs to segregate your data and then use CATALOG.USERAA for TSO user ID and personal user data sets only.

  6. When you create your own user catalog(s), please be sure that it resides on the user volumes listed in the user DASD Configuration section of the delivery email.

  7. If you want to insure your master catalog does not contain unintentional entries, you can use RACF to secure the master catalog so user defined entries are not allowed. Be sure to provide GROUPZ with ACCESS(ALTER) for us to provide IBM automation to continue to operate.

  8. IBM will NOT use parmlib members that have a suffix beginning with 'V', 'Q', or '5' for remote access infrastructure purposes. When making customization updates to VENDOR.* members, please create new members that have a suffix beginning with one of these 3 characters followed by any character of your choice.

  9. IBM recommends creating a dataset called VENDOR.DOCLIB to be used for documenting changes that are made in VENDOR.* libraries, for future reference when moving the guest z/OS system to the next release of z/OS. This data set will already exist in some systems. Please use the existing VENDOR.DOCLIB data set if it already exists for this purpose.

  10. Create your own UNIX ZFS or HFS files and mount under directory /u/vendor. Do NOT create files or directories under “ / “ as this is the root file system under z/OS. The dataset that manages the root directory is very small and will run out of space quickly.