The Auxiliary Disposition facility is a communication technique to help eliminate the paper work involved with special tape handling requests and to assure that those requests are fulfilled in a timely manner.
This facility provides direct communication from the person setting up the job to the master console, tape operator, or tape librarian when the tape volumes are closed or reach end-of-volume. The message appears immediately after the operating system KEEP message.
One of the more common reasons to use Auxiliary Disposition is to notify an operator or librarian that a tape needs to be sent off-site. Such tapes normally require an external label, and Auxiliary Disposition provides an option to generate an external label request at the same time the messages are displayed.
The feature also provides the means to mark tapes out-of-area automatically.
Auxiliary Disposition utilizes a sequential data set which contains all messages required to communicate the special tape handling requests for a particular step. This data set is recognized by CA 1 by a unique ddname (CA 1 system option DSN), and can be a sequential disk data set, a member of a PDS, or included in the job stream following a DD *.
Auxiliary Disposition is invoked at the time a tape is closed or demounted, or it can be invoked as a separate step to give all the disposition messages at one time.
The message format is free-form text. Operator training is minimal because messages can contain all the information needed to perform special tape handling.
Included with this feature is the capability to automatically check tapes out-of-area. The Auxiliary Disposition can display the following requests:
Note: For more information on the Auxiliary Disposition facility, see the Administrator and Operator Guide.
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