This section provides suggestions and guidelines that will help if you need to send diagnostic data to our Product Support. When you need to send relatively small amounts of text data (for example, short Mainframe Access activity traces, parameter settings, excerpts from the system log, excerpts from a dump listing, etc.), it is often convenient to simply include the text in an email or as a text file attachment to an email. Large amounts of data and non-textual information should be packaged and transmitted as described in the following paragraphs.
After gathering large amounts of diagnostic data (for example, SVC dumps, GTF traces, Mainframe Access activity traces, system log contents, etc.), the most expedient way to send the information is using the TCP/IP File Transfer Protocol (FTP) utility. Before you send the data, it is good practice to package the data for transmission. This will reduce transmission time by compressing the data and it will facilitate the handling of data when it is received.
Our Product Support can accommodate data that is packaged using the TSO Interactive Data Transmission Facility (the TSO XMIT and RECEIVE commands) or data that is packaged using IBM's TRSMAIN program (the terse utility). Mainframe Access sample TSOXMIT provides a job that demonstrates the use of TSO XMIT to package a data set for transmission. If you want to use TRSMAIN, we recommend that you start by asking the z/OS systems programming staff at your company if TRSMAIN is already installed and available for use. If it is not, you can download the IBM TRSMAIN program from the ftp.software.ibm.com Web site using FTP. You can access the download using the anonymous user ID with your email address provided as the password. Use change directory commands to locate the TRSMAIN downloads in /s390/mvs/tools/packlib at this IBM ftp site. You should find a single binary file and both plain text and HTML explanations of the procedure for installing the utility.
When your data is ready for transmission, our Product Support can provide additional instructions for sending your data to the ftp.microfocus.com site. This may include specific directory locations, filenames, etc. that should be used. After you have transferred the data, please send a follow-up email to your support representative. This note should list the files that you have sent, the packaging tool(s) that you have used, and the z/OS data set characteristics of both the packaged files and the data sets that will be created when the packages are opened. The z/OS data set characteristics should include the RECFM, LRECL, BLKSIZE, primary space allocation and secondary space allocation.