NOERROR keyword of the JTOPTS contains an error.

Diagnosing The Problem

The syntax check issuing the message EQQZ090W has been added with an old APAR (PM28678) which is in the base code for 930. Nothing has changed this area recently.

The NMM going down after IPL and not before because  you have changed the way the member with NOERROR statements is added.

In the recent situation (NMM goes down) the NOERROR statements are part of the initialization statements and processed at product start up (after the IPL)  as no error member. Before you have added and processed the NOERROR through a modify command NOERRMEM(), while IWSz was already active and running.

In fact, as documented in the EQQZ090W message System action:
"Depending on how you specified the NOERROR value, the normal mode manager (NMM) processing continues or terminates:
If you specified the NOERROR value in the EQQPARM library, the NMM subtask terminates.
If you specified the NOERROR value by using a MODIFY command, the NMM processing continues."

The logic behind this different product behavior is that during initialization an user might lose the NOERROR message notification among several other initialization messages and having or not the NOERROR statements in place can make a big difference in jobs execution. As part of NMM initializiaton parameters failure, the NMM is stopped and thus no jobs are starting, to avoid starting with NOERROR statements not in place.

Instead, in case the NOERROR List update is done through a modify command, there is an user action triggering the statement error (it is not in the IWSz initialization phase) and the user should be monitoring for the results  of his submitted command. NMM was up and running before the modify command and can continue to work based on the definitions already in place, if any, before the modify command was run.