All other situations

When code changes are involved (maintenance, technical previews, new release), or your changes are fairly complex, you should do another installation of z/OS® Explorer. This section describes possible points of conflict between the different installations.

The following list is a brief overview of items that must or are strongly advised to be different between the instances of z/OS Explorer:

  • SMP/E CSI
  • Installation libraries
  • JES Job Monitor TCP/IP port, and thus its configuration file FEJJCNFG
  • JES Job Monitor startup JCL
  • APPC transaction name
  • RSE configuration files, rse.env, *.properties, and *.conf
  • RSE TCP/IP port
  • RSE startup JCL

A more detailed overview is listed as follows:

  • SMP/E CSI
    1. Install each instance of z/OS Explorer in a separate CSI. SMP/E will prevent a second install of the same FMID in a CSI, but will accept installing another FMID. If the second FMID is a newer version, it will delete the existing version of the product. If the second FMID is an older version, the install will fail due to duplicate part names.
  • Installation libraries
    1. Install each instance of z/OS Explorer in separate data sets and directories. Keep in mind that you can only change the z/OS UNIX path by prefixing the IBM® supplied default of /usr/lpp/IBM/zexpl. A valid sample would be /service/usr/lpp/IBM/zexpl.
    2. Customization setup job FEK.SFEKSAMP(FEKSETUP) creates the data sets and directories used to store configuration files. Since the configuration files must be unique, and to avoid overwriting existing customizations, you must use unique data set and directory names when submitting this job.
  • Mandatory parts
    1. JES Job Monitor configuration file FEK.#CUST.PARMLIB(FEJJCNFG) holds the TCP/IP port number of JES Job Monitor and thus cannot be shared. The member itself can be renamed (if the JCL is updated also), so you can place all customized versions of this member in the same data set if you are not doing the updates in the install data set.
    2. JES Job Monitor startup JCL FEK.#CUST.PROCLIB(JMON) refers to FEJJCNFG and therefore cannot be shared either. After renaming the member (and the JOB card if you start it as a user job) you can place all JCL's in the same data set.
    3. The RSE configuration file /etc/zexpl/rse.env holds references to the install path, and optionally to the server log location, which requires it to be unique. The file name is mandatory, so you cannot keep the different copies in the same directory.
    4. The ISPF.conf configuration file has a reference to FEK.SFEKPROC. This is software level specific, so you must create an ISPF.conf file per instance.
    5. All other z/OS UNIX based configuration files (such as *.properties) must reside in the same directory as rse.env and thus cannot be shared, since rse.env must be in an unshared location.
    6. The RSE startup JCL FEK.#CUST.PROCLIB(RSED) cannot be shared since it defines the TCP/IP port number and it has a reference to the install and configuration directories, which must be unique. After renaming the member (and the JOB card if you start it as a user job) you can place all JCL's in the same data set.