Cheryl's Link
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- September 4, 1998
- It’s fitting that we start our Link of the Week with one of my favorite
sites. IBM’s Washington Systems Center in Gaithersburg, MD handles most
of the performance-related problems reported to IBM, and the group has
an enormous wealth of knowledge. They publish flashes whenever they see
a need to notify customers of important performance problems. Felicia Launt
(Cary) and Cindy Rollins (Gaithersburg) have recently redesigned the WSC
home page using Lotus Notes Domino.
The WSC flash numbering scheme has recently changed. WSC flashes were originally numbered using the year and week in the form: Wyyww (e.g. W9608). If multiple flashes were issued during the same week, you might have multiple flashes with the same number, but they always had a different title. When the flashes started appearing on the Web, a suffix of A, B, etc. was added to differentiate the flash numbers during the same week. The developers, and most flash users, don’t really use the suffixes, so if you are passing along a flash number, don’t forget to add the title or topic. According to John Hutchinson of WSC, a new numbering scheme was started on 7/15/98 (week 29) with the form Wyynnn. The flashes will now be sequentially numbered so no duplicates exist; the week number will no longer be part of the number. This is a GREAT improvement!
The WSC home page provides a variety of options for searching and viewing. I notice that most people request a list in flash number sequence in order to see the most recent flashes. I’d recommend, however, that you “view by date” since WSC often updates the flashes. For example on August 20, 1998, several flashes were updated to refer to the new G5 processors instead of the older processors. The very important W9608 (now called W9608B) that documented the overhead in COBOL programs that ran on CMOS processors was updated to show the results on the latest G5 processors (as of 8/20/98). Another useful facility is the “view by product,” so you can, for instance, find all the flashes relating to 9672s or ADSM. Of course, you can always search for any string via text search.
The WSC page also has a pointer to the Networking Systems Center flashes. The NSC provides similar flashes for networking products.