CICS-z/OS® Communications Server actions after an emergency restart

When LU-LU sessions are re-established after an emergency restart (and subsequent processing), CICS® participates in a resynchronization protocol with logical units to discover if any messages, in either direction, were lost when CICS was terminated.

The logical units for which resynchronization is required will have been marked in the TCTTEs. Resynchronization is not attempted in the following cases:
  • If the terminal was acquired by a main terminal operation specifying COLDACQ.
  • If the terminal was acquired with the EXEC CICS SET TERMINAL ACQSTATUS(COLDACQ) command.
  • If the session is a pipeline session.
  • If the TCTTE is marked to perform a cold start of the session by the TCT assembly process. This is done for terminals such as 3270 terminals that do not support the set and test sequence number (STSN) command.
Note: If the previous session abended, the use of COLDACQ overrides CICS integrity control. This could lead to data integrity problems. Also, you should check the CSMT log for an activity keypoint after the restart of a session following a CICS failure. If there is no activity keypoint, you should issue COLDACQ again after the next emergency restart.
For each logical unit that does require resynchronization, CICS issues an STSN command that notifies the logical unit of the sequence numbers known to CICS—that is, those numbers that backout processing placed in the TCTTE. The logical unit can compare these sequence numbers with those that it has logged for itself, and can thus determine if any messages were lost.
  • If an input message was lost, the logical unit should retransmit it to CICS.
  • If an output message was lost, CICS retransmits the message from the resend slot and, in so doing, deletes the resend slot.
The message remains in the resend slot if CICS does not retransmit it. This occurs if the resynchronization process shows that the output message was not lost, or if the logical unit does not support the STSN command; the 3270 is in this category.