FultonM

My blog

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5 minutes, 16 z/OS tools

5 minutes. 16 z/os tools. Want to make your life better?

bash, cURL, git, vim, gnu make. Ever been frustrated they aren’t on your z/OS system? What about the latest find, diff, less, gzip, bzip, xz variants you are used to on your Linux box? Get them all and dozens more. I wrote about the z/OS Open Tools Open Source initiative awhile back and more recently showcased a few tools. Now see how easy it is to get them yourself. For those that like to read…

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Life is easy with good tools

Get the latest open source tools for z/OS. Life is easy.

Photo by Matthias Speicher on Unsplash A group of us have been working on porting the latest Open Source tools to z/OS. I gave an intro to the z/OS Open Source Community a few months ago, and now I’d like to provide a simple example of how useful these tools can be. A very common problem is to perform a search and replace across a set of files in a directory tree. Maybe your manager said the…

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Barbarians at the Gate: Securing my public z/OS

If something happens on your z/OS system, do you know who was hanging around?

Photo by Juan Gomez on Unsplash I was pretty excited when Wazi as a Service became generally available. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it’s very cool. You log in to IBM Cloud, request a z/OS system with a particular number of CPUs, memory, disk, and in a few minutes, you can access your system with your own public IP address. You can also add additional volumes at any time and…

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The z/OS Open Source Community

Lets work on z/OS Open Source as a community

At the start of 2022, I tackled porting Perl to z/OS. It confirmed that given a small effort, Open Source packages can be ported to z/OS. Perhaps more importantly, I realized that the Open Source community is keen to work with z/OS developers to upstream updates to the development line (blead on Perl) to enable z/OS as a recognized platform. With one success under my belt, I reached out to a…

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Hide your privates

If you use ssh to connect to servers, read this!

sshhhhh My mac had turned into a bit of a mess. I had ssh private keys (that use Passphrases of course!) in a variety of places and I wasn’t very happy about it. I have several different servers that I connect to. There are a few GitHub systems, a Linux system, and of course several z/OS systems. For each z/OS system, I have a few different accounts: one for software installation, one for…

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IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack Uncovered

See how IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack streamlines software installation and configuration

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack In my last article, I introduced the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack. In this article, I’ll dig into installation, configuration, and usage of the installed software. Installing Software on z/OS with z/OS Cloud Broker To install software with z/OS Cloud Broker on a z/OS endpoint, you first need to install the z/OS Package Manager, which runs natively on…

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IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack Introduction

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack is here! Take 5 and get the highlights

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack Today, IBM announced the general availability of IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack. It’s an amazing software collection that truly integrates Z and Cloud, enabling our ISVs, business partners, and customers to accelerate their application modernization. Our documentation is hot off the press for those that want to read more. What is IBM Z and Cloud…

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Enabling Open Source for z/OS: Perl

Enable code for z/OS - don't just port it!

Photo by Fred Rivett on Unsplash This article is a follow-on to my previous article titled Is z/OS ASCII or EBCDIC? Yes! which discusses building bi-modal z/OS C applications. Historically, many people have ported Open Source applications to z/OS. I’d like to propose a subtle shift and talk about enabling Open Source applications for z/OS. To me, porting implies a one-off effort to get some…

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Is z/OS ASCII or EBCDIC? Yes!

Learn (more) about how to work with ASCII and EBCDIC on z/OS

Photo by Author TL;DR : go to the summary at the end of the post. One of the strengths of z/OS is that it supports traditional and modern applications, programming languages, and even data simultaneously. I can code in assembler, C, COBOL, Java, Python, Node.js or Golang on z/OS. With this strength comes some complexity, especially around the way your files are encoded. There are many ways to…

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The Z Open Automation Utilities Community

The Z Open Automation Utilities Community

A vibrant discussion Getting started on z/OS as a developer? Ever gone to a mainframe forum and asked a question, only to have some curmudgeon reply to RTFM, but they don’t actually tell you which manual to read? z/OS can be daunting – it’s HUGE. I’ve been working on z/OS for over 30 years and I still ask a lot of questions (I just skip over the curmudgeons). There are several places people can…

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Metal z/OS: 64->31 C SVC99

Metal z/OS: 64->31 C SVC99

Photo by israel palacio on Unsplash Background z/OS is incredibly powerful, especially in the myriad of ways you can work with your data on disk. Unfortunately, many of those methods are only available as 31-bit services, and often require that you fill in assembler control blocks that can be annoying in C. If you want to use a 31-bit z/OS service, you not only need to call them in 31-bit, but…

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VSAM: The no-charge z/OS DB

VSAM: The no-charge z/OS DB

Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash Getting Started What is VSAM? The acronym is old enough that AM means access method, first coined for OS/360 in the early 1960’s. Access Method just means a method to access data on disk, tape or an external device. VSAM provides several ways to access data, but only on disk (no tape support, except for export/import/backup activities). The VS means…

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z/OSMF from the z/OS cmd line

z/OSMF from the z/OS cmd line

Photo by Florian Berger on Unsplash

z/OSMF has some very cool services. One that I just recently noticed was the API to read and update system variables (which you can think of as a service for managing key/value pairs). These services should not be confused with classic z/OS system symbolsthat you use in z/OS. The z/OSMF APIs are general purpose: you can provide almost any key/value pair you…

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Getting started: Ansible on z/OS

Getting started: Ansible on z/OS

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Way back in 2018, I wrote about z/OS automated provisioning. The world has not stood still, and it is time to update how I refresh my zD&T systems. So, I created an ansible sample that pushes IBM Open Enterprise Pythonto my systems to get started. My intent is to extend the code to push the other core tools the systems need, such as bash, git, and curl. I am looking…

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Black Developers Matter

As the veil of ignorance lifts for non-BIPOC people and I really listen to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour, I recognize things I have said and done in my professional career that I should not have. As a software developer, the code I write represents who I am in, a very similar way to my prose.

In software, many lack education and understanding around offensive…

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EASY Secure transfer on z/OS

EASY Secure transfer on z/OS

Photo by Ondrej Machart on Unsplash TL;DR: Just the good stuff…

httpsget lets you securely download files to your z/OS system from the web. The code doesn’t have any prerequisites other than z/OS – just copy it to a zFS directory on your z/OS system. Enter httpsget -? for syntax. A simple example to write the (ASCII) google home page to /tmp/google.out would be:

httpsget -o…

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zbrew: Creating A New Package

zbrew: Creating A New Package

unsplash-logo Jorge Tung

My zbrew introduction and deep dive talked about how zbrew works. This article describes how to create your own zbrew installation and configuration package for your product. After all, a package manager needs packages!

The following describes what is required to package your own software product and then walks through the COBOL 6.3.0 compiler package as a specific…

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