First, I want to congratulate Ed S. for being the first customer to send us a picture of the VNC console. Unfortunately, it was for diagnostic purposes, but he got the DSL system booting up. Thanks Ed for the valuable feedback that you’ve given us. We appreciate it. We’d love to see status and updates from anyone else too.

On June 4, we told you about a problem in item #3 about the mutually exclusive nature of SME and DSL. We’ve solved the problem, but haven’t finished documenting it yet. There are two set up changes to make. There were no code errors and the net effect is the system is easier to manage with the changes. We hope to have them documented by tomorrow.

However, in the mean time, there is a simple work around. Instead of issuing z86 (start=all  – which creates the problem, change it to z86 (start=demodsl  and just boot up the dsl image.

You could also do z86 (start=1  and it will boot up which ever image is first in your PROFILE Z86. BTW, if you were ever wondering why we’d have a command like that – start the first xxx number in the profile, it is for benchmark purposes. We have several hundred users defined in our PROFILE, all clones of each other. Given the hardware that we are running on at the time, we can start a given number to do the benchmark. The alternative would be to issue the command naming every user….it wasn’t worth doing 🙂

There’s a few other things that will be forthcoming. We presented at the Marist College hosted Enterprise Computing Conference yesterday. We did a 15 minute presentation followed by a 15 minute demo. It was a terrific audience response. But more importantly, we got asked a lot of tactical and strategic questions. We’re going to add those to the FAQ section over the next couple of days. When we’re done, we’ll post the update here. But who knows, we may add a few now, some later, etc. Check back if you’d like.

Personally, I’m going to this blog a lot to update it, but we didn’t include a link to the blog on the home page, so it’s either a bookmark or a double click. That’s on my list to fix.

Finally, we got some comments about the Operations Manual. Some questions about examples that describe z860001 userid, when you readers were looking for DEMODSL or SME8. Sorry about that. That’s a little bit of internal Mantissa stuff getting through. We have a collection of operating systems at various software levels that we boot. Changing your zVM userid is a pain. So we’ve been using a naming convention of z86001, z86002…..Someone else has z86D01, D02, etc. I have four z/VM userid’s but about 15 OS’s defined in my PROFILE Z86. Rather than delete a profile entry, I comment it out. So today, D01 could be SME and tomorrow, it’s DSL and the next day, it’s SME with WordPress. It all depends on what we are testing that day.

So anyway, we’ll correct the manual toward what we shipped in the Beta code. However, like any z/VM userid, you can name them anything you want. But if you do change them in z/VM, don’t forget to update your PROFILE Z86 file.