Changes to Managed System lists with tacmd

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Changes to Managed System lists with tacmd

There has been a change brought in at 6.3 FP02 that allows a MSL to exist with no members subscribed to it.

This allows MSL's to be created before you know the managed systems you want to allocate to it.

It also allows the last member of a MSL to be removed without the MSL being deleted.

So now you can create a MSL via tacmd ,  login to tacmd and then run the comamnd:

tacmd createsystemlist -l San_list

You will be able to see the MSL in the list with the command

tacmd listsystemlist

and with the command

tacmd viewsystemlist -l San_list

you will see that there are no members in the Assigned Managed Systems.

Members can be added and removed from the list as before with the tacmd editsystemlist  -a or -d options:

In the above the MS has been added and now even though it is the only member in the list it can also be removed

Previous to 6.3 FP02 the following message would have been seen if the last MS was tried to be removed from  a list:

KUICEL009E: The delete operation cannot delete all the systems from the specified system list.
 The specified system list was not updated because you can not remove all the entries from the system list.
 Check the specified system list and run the command again.

However now the list can be seen as empty and still listed:

However there are a couple of issues if you use both the GUI and the tacmd commands to do this work.

The first is:

Creating a MSL in the TEP GUI has always allowed without adding any managed systems to it, you can save it and then go back to it later in the GUI.
However it has never and, at the moment,  still does not write this to the TEMS tables, so if an empty list is created by the TEP GUI you cannot view the list via a tacmd command.
Then as soon as a managed system has been added,  it will then be written to the TEMS tables and the tacmd command will show it.

The second is:

If you remove the last entry via the TEP GUI before 6.3 FP04 this will allow the empty list to be maintained and the tacmd commands will again show it.

However if you are at 6.3 FP04 the removal of the last managed system from the list will also delete the MSL, this is due to a change that was brought in for APAR IV61046

IV61046 is to fix the 'event clearing' in Situation Event Console especially in logical workspace.

If this change is not needed then the new variable:

KFW_CMW_REMOVE_MSL_MEMBER_EARLY=Y

can be set in the TEPS config. 

Then the behaviour will be as 6.3 Fp02 and 6.3FP03;  the MSL list will be left with no members existing.

If the variable is needed, then if you need the empty MSL do not remove the last member via the GUI use the tacmd command.

These two GUI issues are being addressed in Apar IV73322. (The fix is in 6.3 FP06)

It should also be noted any MSL's created before 6.3FP02 cannot have the last entry removed even with a tacmd command;  as they still work under the old behaviour. This is being investigated at the moment.

29 June 2015:

Just an up date to the issue of not being able to remove the last entry on an old MSL list.  This has been investigated and was found to be an issue with the version of the tacmd command being used not the age of the MSL; so the removal should work correctly on any MSL.

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