MVSFORUMS.com

[krylon]

Hello everyone,

I am currently working on a migration of some z/OS machines from BIND4 to BIND9.
The configuration and zone files reside inside the OMVS/Unix Subsystem HFS, and are edited with the ISPF editor (the IBM-terminal-emulation we use behaves like a dumb terminal in the Unix shell, hence vi does not work...).

This turns out to be nasty at times: The machines are located in Germany and obviously have a German charset installed.
The results are confusing: Curly braces - omnipresent in BIND's configuration - don't exist in EBCDIC and we have to use special German characters to represent curly braces.
What's more confusing is that @ is replaced with

[semigeezer]

Not exactly a solution, but...
When you start ISPF, you can specify a language, something like LANG(GERMAN). See the doc for the ISPF command. Basically all this does is set up new translation tables, so for example, the ! and | should be OK.

Also, your system may have a different port defined for telnetting into the Unix side so that vi will work. Frequently it is something ending in 23 such as 1023 or 2023. Try nmap from another box (linux) to probe the ports in the z/OS box or have a look at the TCPIP configuration file on z/OS, or talk to the system people.

I find the unix shell pretty lackluster, but it can be improved by using the tcsh shell to get things like command line recall.

[krylon]

Thanks!

Unfortunately, ISPF is started as soon as I logon... But I will look up the documentation.

While I can try to telnet to different ports, I don't have a Linux-box available, plus using a port scanner on our corporate network probably wouldn't be considered an act of politeness exactly...

Well, I come from the Unix world. I find z/OS pretty strange all in all, hence I'm rather glad there's at least a bit of familiar territory. Then again, it's a little weird (especially that it runs only as a dumb terminal while IBM's terminal emulation pretty clearly has fullscreen capabilities, is putting me off...), as you say. Some commands seem to missing altogether - in some cases I can see a reason for this: passwd is missing, probably because user and account management is done via RACF.

Thank you very much!

Oh, and I apologize for posting to the wrong forum... Must've been a lapse of attention...

Benjamin

[krylon]

Hello,

I managed to actually find all the answers I need. =)
I found a page on the servers of the university of Vienna that contains a list with "variant characters" in EBCDIC, among these the exclamation mark and my beloved vertical bar (|)...
The most important replacements are '!' where I mean '|' and a German Umlaut-U for the exclamation mark.
I seriously hope IBM will find its way to UTF-country one day... or at least the ISO-8859-line...

Oh yes, and being able to e.g. pipe netstat's output through grep I was able to actually find the port an ordinary telnet-server is listening on (9023 in my case).
And when log into the machine via plain telnet, I get all the characters as they are supposed to be, as well as VT100-compatibility.
Vi works now, too!

Thanks again for your help,
Benjamin