Jeff Kell wrote:

> I don't know about any "dynamic" methods that don't require some form
> of manual intervention, but bear in mind that each time that you boot
> the system the drive will be reset with compression and auto-eject
> disabled.

Jeff is correct. At least, I can say that his experience in this regard
mirrors mine.

> Ron Burnett, then Jeff again:
> > I guess one solution is to put a call to devctrl.privxl.telesup (or
> > whatever its called) to force compression on, at the beginning
> > of each store job.
> > But isn't that a bit of a kludge?
>
> Yes.  But a relatively minor one, relatively speaking.

We did the following:
1) Copied the DEVCTRL command file into PUB.SYS -- this isn't as big a
security risk as you'd think since it doesn't actually do the device
control, but builds parameters to pass to the program
DEVTOOL.MPEXL.TELESUP, which is what does the dirty work. And we left
that where it was.
2) :ALTSEC DEVTOOL.MPEXL.TELESUP;NEWACD=(X:OPERATOR.SYS) so this user
has execute access to the program.
3) Limited OPERATOR.SYS to logging on at LDEV 20 only and created a
separate user ID for the operators. No human actually uses OPERATOR.SYS,
it's strictly to run things at startup that we don't want to (or can't)
put into SYSSTART.
4) Put the DEVCTRL <ldev#> COMPRESSION=ENABLE UNLOAD=ENABLE commands
into a logon udc for OPERATOR.SYS. (It logs off when done, too, so no
security risk there.)

Now DEVCTRL gets run after every system boot, only runs at startup but
*always* runs at startup, and no mere mortal can execute it due to the
safeguards built in. The nice thing about having DEVCTRL in PUB.SYS is
that I can run it from my user ID if I want to (since I have SM) and I
don't have to specify the fqfn (that's "fully-qualified file name," not
a dirty-word acronym).

It might look like a lot of work to set this up, but it's not; you only
have to do it once (except doing another ALTSEC when DEVTOOL gets
updated) and then you can forget about it.

One caveat: the DEVTOOL program was enhanced with an additional
parameter (ONLINE=ENABLE) in MPE 55, so we had to copy DEVCTRL from
TELESUP to SYS again, because the parameters had also changed
accordingly and the new DEVTOOL program doesn't play well with the old
DEVCTRL command. Remind me to tell you sometime about what happened
between the time we upgraded to 55 and the time we figured this out. ;-)

FWIW, HTH
Patrick
--
Patrick Santucci
Technical Services Systems Programmer
Kirke-Van Orsdel, Inc.
mailto:[log in to unmask]
Visit our site! http://www.kvi-ins.com
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I lacked experience and now that I'm experienced life is
complex because I'm not young?" - James "Rainman" Trudeau