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Operating with the serial console

You can interact with your z/OS virtual server instance by using the serial console from the IBM Cloud UI.

Note: To connect to the serial console, you need to be assigned Operator (or greater) and Console Administrator roles for the virtual server instance in IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM). Otherwise, the serial console is disabled.

Follow the instructions in Connecting to z/OS virtual server instances to open the serial console.

Then, you can enter the help command to see the commands that you can issue and the keyboard guidance.

You can enter the following commands to modify z/OS workloads.

Command Function
ipl Start loading a specific z/OS workload to main memory
oprmsg Issue operator communication
start Start the Control Program (CP) that was in the stopped state
stop Stop the Control Program (CP)

Table 1: Available commands

You can then issue <command> help to get more help for each of the commands.

The ipl command

The ipl command starts the process of loading an operating system or a stand-alone utility program.

Here is the command syntax:

ipl device-number [parm parm-value] [gprparm xxxx] [clear]
  • device-number refers to a device number (“address”) in the devmap that contains the initial load program for the operating system.
  • parm-value is a string of up to 8 characters that provides more information about the operating system that is loaded.
  • gprparm provides a string of characters that are inserted into the general-purpose registers (as EBCDIC characters that use 32-bit registers), starting with register 0, placing 4 characters in each register. The keyword can be entered as gpr_parm. The gprparm function was carried forward from much earlier systems and has no known use today.
  • clear causes IBM Z system memory to be zeroed before loading the operating system.

The return values are as follows:

  • 0: IPL function started.
  • 16: Unable to initialize the manual operations interface.
  • 99: The device number is not valid.

The oprmsg command

The oprmsg command provides input to IBM Z operating systems through the SCLP operator message interface. (This interface is also known as the HMC or the hardware console.)

Here is the command syntax:

oprmsg {text}

{text} is the message that is sent to the IBM Z operating system. If it contains any special characters (such as parentheses), the message should be enclosed in single quotation marks.

This command is used when you shut down a z/OS virtual server instance.

You can also issue oprmsg 'D A,L' to get the status of the z/OS subsystems.

The return values are as follows:

  • 0: The message was sent to the SCLP operator interface.
  • 12: No input text was found.
  • 16: Unable to initialize the manual operation interface.
  • 32: Unable to initialize the SCLP message interface.

The start command

The start command starts a CP that was in the stopped state (due to an earlier stop command). ISV zPDT must be operational when using this command.

Here is the command syntax:

start [CP-number]

CP-number is the target CP number.

The return values are as follows:

  • 0: Operation is complete.
  • 12: CP number is invalid.
  • 16: Unable to initialize the manual operation interface.

The stop command

The stop command places a CP in the stopped state. The CP can be restarted with a start command or a reset function.

Here is the command syntax:

stop [CP-number]

CP-number is the target CP number.

Generally, a CP is stopped to display register or memory contents. In rare cases, it might be stopped to halt the process of an application or operating system function.

The return values are as follows:

  • 0: Operation is complete.
  • 12: CP number is invalid.
  • 16: Unable to initialize the manual operation interface.