EXPDT = CATALOG

Products

• VM:Tape for z/VM

Issue/Introduction

I was doing some research for a project and saw this expiration date of CATALOG.

This is a customer system and it is a shared TMC, managed by CA-1.

What does CATALOG mean? Is it MVS related as I cannot find any reference in the VMTAPE manuals.

 

VOL=F67763 OWNER=AAAAAAAA  EXPDT=CATALOG   LABEL=SL  CUNIT=073E       36/ENHXF  PWD=NONE                                                                       

           LASTUSER=AAAAAAAA   LDATE=2009/110 LUNIT=073E COUNT=1                  

           FILESEQ=0001 CRTDT=2009/110 CTIME=15:19 DSNAME=<hlq>.UNIX.APR                                                                             

Environment

Release : 2.0

Component : CA VM:Tape for zVM

Resolution

Someone must have reported this as a VM:Tape/CA-1 problem back in 1992, because a specific update was put in to display "EXPDT=CATALOG" when the TMC EXPDT field has this value:

=X'90000F'  MVS catalog controlled? 

So it's one of the "special" dates implemented by CA-1.

If you see several of these in this TMC, then perhaps the customer actually used this expiration mechanism at some point. Otherwise, perhaps that value was erroneously set for the EXPDT field by a fumbled edit.

In either case, that is why VMTAPE LIST is displaying "EXPDT=CATALOG" for the volume.

Additional Information

EXPDT=CATALOG means the tape will not expire until the dataset is no longer on the os catalog.  Once it is uncataloged from the os catalog then ca1 will expire it.  If this dataset is part of a multifile tape then all files must be expired before it will scratch.