fish-git/askforhelp

How to Ask for Help

How to Ask for Help

Introduction

When filing a problem report it is never harmful to provide more information than needed, but is almost always harmful to not provide enough information.

If your problem report does not provide enough information many people will not bother to even respond as they consider it a waste of time to ask for information which should have been provided in the original problem report.

Help others to help you!

Try to provide as much information as possible when filing problem reports!

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Details

• Before You Ask:

  • If you are using a third party product to provide needed Hercules functionality (such as SDL's "CTCI-WIN" product), have you consulted the provided "Help" file that comes with the product? For example, did you perform a multi-directional Ping Test as part of your troubleshooting? If you did, you should probably provide the output in your problem report.

• Be precise and informative about your problem.:

  • The specific version of Hercules you are using (i.e. the output of the Hercules version command).

  • Your complete Hercules configuration file.

  • Your complete Hercules log file.

  • What guest operating system and release level are you running under Hercules? VM? MVS? z/VM? z/OS? Other?

  • Your complete TCPIP.PROFILE dataset if your problem is networking related.

  • Which host operating system platform are you using? (Windows? Linux? Mac?) Which version is it? Windows 7? CentOS 6.8? Is it 32-bit or 64-bit?

  • Is the problem consistent and repeatable? What procedure can others use to try and re-create your problem?

  • Is there anything else you can think of that might be related to your problem? Do you have any unusual or related software installed on your host? Have you made any recent configuration changes to your host?

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Closing Remarks

If you provide a quality problem report with the information others need to help you, you will stand a much better chance of actually obtaining the quality help you seek.

Remember: the people you are asking are not psychic! They don't know the details of your problem. Only you know that.

If you provide them with the details they need to help you, they might actually be willing and able to help you.

Otherwise you're just wasting their time.

askforhelp's Issues

DASDCOMP Message HHC02424E against 3380 created volume

I created a 3380 dasd volume using DASDINIT then immediately did a DASDCOMP and received message HHC02424E.

PC OS is Windows 10 and the commands issued were DASDINIT and DASDCOMP from command line. Those commands and resulting messages follow.

C:\Program Files\Hercules\Hercules>DASDINIT -a "C:/Program Files/Hercules/Dasd/RES380.3380" 3380-J RES380
HHC02499I Hercules utility dasdinit - DASD image file creation program - version 4.2.0.9708-SDL-gdc7243b2
HHC01414I (C) Copyright 1999-2019 by Roger Bowler, Jan Jaeger, and others
HHC01417I ** The SoftDevLabs version of Hercules **
HHC01415I Build date: Jul 8 2019 at 12:19:44
HHC00467W Maximum cylinders supported is 65536
HHC00007I Previous message from function 'create_ckd' at dasdutil.c(1848)
HHC00462I 0:0000 CKD file C:/Program Files/Hercules/Dasd/RES380.3380: creating 3380 volume RES380: 886 cyls, 15 trks/cyl, 47616 bytes/track
HHC00460I 0:0000 CKD file C:/Program Files/Hercules/Dasd/RES380.3380: 886 cylinders successfully written
HHC02423I DASD operation completed

C:\Program Files\Hercules\Hercules>CCKDCOMP -3 "C:/Program Files/Hercules/Dasd/RES380.3380"
HHC02499I Hercules utility cckdcomp - CCKD compress program - version 4.2.0.9708-SDL-gdc7243b2
HHC01414I (C) Copyright 1999-2019 by Roger Bowler, Jan Jaeger, and others
HHC01417I ** The SoftDevLabs version of Hercules **
HHC01415I Build date: Jul 8 2019 at 12:19:44
HHC02424E Dasd image file format unsupported or unrecognized: C:/Program Files/Hercules/Dasd/RES380.3380
HHC00007I Previous message from function 'main' at cckdcomp.c(99)

C:\Program Files\Hercules\Hercules>

Hopefully that is sufficient to determine what is happening. Note that I tried variations of 3380-J -E and -K with and without specifying alternate tracks with same results.

Let me know if there is any more info you might need.

Dave Kreiss

Hang in Hercules taking a Standalone Dump

David,

I am running MVS 3.8 with modifications and took a wait state 009064 (S0C4 in NIP) during IPL to a 3390 SYSRES. I have previously built a standalone dump on a 3350 (device 153) and written 4 tape marks to the output dump aws tape (a 3420 at 480). After the wait state I do a store status (STORE command) successfully. I then mount the standalone dump output tape on 480 (via a devinit). I then IPL 153 and Hercules hangs. I have done this quite a few times and did one time get a dump on 480. Don't ask what I did correctly or why it worked that one time, I don't know what I might have done differently.

Hercules Hang Doc.zip

So again here is what I did:

1. IPL 19F got disabled wait state 00020000 80090064
2. store
3. devinit 480 "\Program Files\Hercules\Tape\sad.aws" awstape
4. IPL 153
5. I get a prompt on the 3277 at 010 to which I reply
6. Instruction counter does nothing and Hercules console doesn't respond. I entered several quit commands to no avail.
7. I do a windows close (right click on ICON) and select close.

Enclosed is the Hercules log, my IPL batch file, the configuration in a zip file.

I am running the latest (I think) prebuilt Hercules-4.2.1.9826 in a DOS window.
Operating system is Windows 10 latest (build 1909).

Let me know what else you might need.

Dave Kreiss
[email protected]