IBM Mainframe Forum

Hello all, new Jr systems programmer and first time poster here, go easy!
Automated operations folk came to me with a dataset that has a created date of 2008/10/15, but a referred date of 2155/13/70.
There were maybe 6-7 datasets in their control that has this issue, but no system datasets that we could find.

My thought, was that a process of theirs that touched these datasets corrupted/changed/altered the referred date, as no system datasets are affected.
They think it's an MVS/OAM/DFSMS issue on our end that changed the date.
Anyone ever have this issue before?

you did not post enough to work on ...

zOS level
type of dataset
dasd/tape
the overall environment of the mishap ...

the best people to work with are thso of Your storage support

Z/OS 1.13
PO FB 80 27920
DASD 3390
These are PROD datasets, TEST, INTG, QUAL, DEVL Datasets seem to be unaffected.

I know, but I wanted to try and take the inititive to try and get answers on my own.

Hello and welcome to the froum,

It is a good thing to look for answers. It may be that in this case only those on that system will be able to determine what has happened.

What automation product is beinig used? Someone might open an issue with that vendor's support.

It sounds like the PROD environment was set up differently than the others.

No one here will be able to find what was done differently.

This seems strange to me. Dates in the VTOC are stored in 3 bytes. The first byte is the year, as a 1 byte binary number from 0 to 255. The second and third bytes are the day of the year. The year you show is clearly 255 in the year byte: 1900+255=2155. The month and day of month you show depend on the exact method used to translate day of year to month and day of month. It would not surprise me if the bytes turn out to be X'FFFF'. I can tell you the method I usually use would produce some awful output if it was handed a day of year = X'FFFF', if it didn't yield an S0C4! The easiest way to display the VTOC data for a single data set is the TSO LISTDS line mode command.The 70015C in the second line of the FORMAT1 DSCB is the last reference date. The 70015B in the first line of the FORMAT 1 DSCB is the creation date. The 000000 following the creation date is the expiration date.

How it got set I won't try to guess.

Good luck.

These users thanked the author steve-myers for the post:

Akatsukami (Fri Dec 14, 2012 3:53 pm)

Update. Ends up being a new error on the latest version of FDR. Vendor is working on fix as we speak. Thanks for the info guys.

Thanks for letting us now ..
hope that You environment is not FUBARed