IBM z/OS Management Facility (z/OSMF)

 Overriding "Must be in Master Catalog" during z/OS V3R1.0 Deployment

Pierre Legault's profile image
Pierre Legault posted Tue February 11, 2025 10:32 AM

How can we steer datasets with the "Must be in Master Catalog" attribute to user catalogs of our own choosing?

We have decades of experience laying down z/OS (and OS/390) ServerPacs and wish to continue to use our naming conventions which include laying down certain datasets with the "Must be in Master Catalog" attribute to user catalogs of our own choosing.

The old ISPF CustomPac Dialog allowed the overidding of the "Must be in Master Catalog" attribute which allowed us to achieve our goals.

What is the corresponding procedure with a z/OS MF ServerPac install?

Kurt Quackenbush's profile image
Kurt Quackenbush posted Tue February 11, 2025 01:41 PM

Pierre, the "Must be in Master Catalog" property is for reference only.  The property does not prohibit you from choosing to catalog a data set in a user catalog.

On the Catalogs page in the Deployment Configuration wizard, select the desired data set name prefix from the list and click Actions -> Select Catalog.  On the Select Catalog page, if the user catalog you want is already in the list, then select it and click OK.  Otherwise click either Actions -> Add Existing Catalog to identify an existing user catalog, or Actions -> New Catalog to define a new user catalog.

Kurt Quackenbush

Pierre Legault's profile image
Pierre Legault posted Tue February 11, 2025 02:17 PM

Your solution worked Kurt.

I guess I lost common sense after spending the morning troubleshooting a "Catalog Name" that was intent on being "MASTER" instead of "USER". I had to revert to temporarily renaming my intended master catalog to CATALOG.MCAT to get out of this one.

Thank you.

Kurt Quackenbush's profile image
Kurt Quackenbush posted Tue February 11, 2025 02:32 PM

Curious, what deployment scenario are you using?  Are you wanting to catalog the new data sets in your existing driving system master and user catalogs, or create a brand new master and user catalogs for the new data sets?

Pierre Legault's profile image
Pierre Legault posted Tue February 11, 2025 02:37 PM

Create a brand new master and user catalogs for the new data sets.

I have an unverified hunch that I might have assigned the datasets destined to one of the USERCATs to the MASTERCAT at first, maybe setting the tone for the rest of the definitions.

Kurt Quackenbush's profile image
Kurt Quackenbush posted Tue February 11, 2025 02:46 PM

Ah, well, if you chose the option to create a brand new master catalog, then the deployment configuration is initialized with just the new master catalog, and all target data sets by default will be cataloged in the new master catalog.  You can add new user catalogs, as I described earlier, but the initial default is just for the single new master catalog.

Let me know if you have further questions or concerns.

Kurt Quackenbush

kurtq@us.ibm.com