Using the Remote Configuration Editor on z/OS

On z/OS the only way of editing and modifying Config files stored on z/OS is by using the Remote Configuration Editor. See Using the Remote Configuration Editor for some general characteristics for this particular way of editing Config files. In addition to that, there are some additional considerations when using the Remote CE for z/OS:

1. Config files developed locally must be uploaded (using FTP) in binary mode to the z/OS computer.
2. The default encoding on z/OS is EBCDIC (or IBM-1047 as it is also known). It is very different from ASCII or from UTF-8. There are no common character ranges between it and ASCII/UTF-8 (whereas the range 0-127 is the same between ASCII and UTF-8).

   This is why any text in EBCDIC viewed as ASCII/UTF-8 looks unintelligible and the other way round.

   Any file created on a Windows or Unix computer (for example, a properties file, a text file, and so on.) that needs to be read by TDI running on a z/OS system must follow the native encoding format of z/OS. One way of converting a Windows file to the native z/OS encoding format is to use the encconvz utility shipped with TDI in the "tools" directory.

   Here is an example (UNIX) usage of the encconvz command:

   ./encconvz myfile_win.txt   myfile_z/OS.txt    ISO-8859-1   IBM-1047

   For more information, see Handling configuration and properties files.

3. The tdisrvctl CLI remote utility is installed in the TDI_root_directory/bin directory. See Command Line Interface - tdisrvctl utility.

   Note that for z/OS, by default, the tdisrvctl utility is configured to create logs in the TDI_root_directory/logs/tdisrvctl.log file. Since this could be a read-only location, it is recommended that you edit the TDI_root_directory/etc/tdisrvctl-Log4J.properties file to point its log file to a writable location. The property to edit in the tdisrvctl-log-4j.properties file is: Log4J.appender.Default.file. Also, if the -h (hostname) option is skipped, the tdisrvctl utility takes localhost as the default. This may not work on z/OS for all cases. Always specify the -h option with the computer's IP address.