I held team meetings once a week during which we accomplished a number of tasks including familiarizing students with z/VM and Linux on z/Series, Linux installation on z/Series, forming teams and project discussions, weekly status, and general help and Q&A sessions. I kept notes on attendance, progess, and small assignments given to the team throughout the semester. I also maintained an FTP server containing many Linux and z/Server IBM RedBook publications that many team members found useful. This library has grown and is expected to continue growing as members find other manuals that are helpful.
I wrote one two page tutorial teaching students how to install Linux on z/Series hardware, and one 25 page tutorial teaching students how to use and administer z/VM. The tutorials cover many topics, contain screenshots and will get updated next semester to correct ommisions and include new topics.
Linux Install Guide
z/VM Guide
This started the first week of the semester when I had to save the z/Server from the mess that it had been left in at the end of the summer. I first had to fix the lighthouse (IBM 2074) configuration and then fix the physical hardware setup and get the LPSYS LPAR functioning. After this I found z/VM in a broken state and without network access. After a few trips to the machine room and some time with the RedBook collection I was able to get z/VM to a working state.
I also had to create a virtualized environment within z/VM that could be used by Cosi for accomplishing work like hosting web services, performing Linux installs and facilitating whatever the needs of several project based teams would be. This involved swap and spool volume management, DASD formatting and management, as well as allocation of OSA (i.e z/Server network devivces) devices to guests, as well as other miscellaneous system tasks. An FTP server on the z/server was needed to facilitate Linux installs and kernel updates. A central hub guest was needed to act as a bridge between our real lan and our virtual lans. Several virtual lans needed to be created and maintained.
This also entailed the creation of a z/Server Emergency Power Outage procedure worksheet that a worker of OIT could use to safely bring down the server in the case of an emergency or a power outage.
Emergency Power Outage Worksheet (passwords removed)
As a GUI Team member I led the development process and guided the rest of the team as we came up with a functionality document describing the features and the tasks that our project will perform. I also gave the team an intro to the fundamentals of softwate engineering.
I also was able to assist a member in setting up a second TCPIP stack within VM for the purposes of running a virtual TCPIP LAN segment. This is a task that I could not find documentation on but decided to attempt anyway. It was a success :)
I helped another team member install DirMaint on our z/Server. This was needed because DirMaint is used heavily by the System management APIs in z/VM 4.4 which is what our project is based on.