This post is part of a series exploring the unique aspects and capabilities of WebSphere Liberty when running on z/OS.
We'll also explore considerations when moving from WebSphere traditional on z/OS to Liberty on z/OS.
The next post in the series is here.
To start at the beginning, follow this link to the first post.
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I’ve pretty much run off the end of the list of topics I’d planned when I started this blog series two years ago. I thought maybe what I could get into next was something a bit more concrete and less just me flinging opinions around. But I don’t want to get too much into just repeating things you can already find in the official documentation. Then, the other day, I was looking at a messages.log that a customer had sent in as part of a support case and explaining to one of our support folks what one of the messages in there meant.
Ah ha! What if I just went through the output of messages.log from some server (probably I could just lift one from one of the servers started by our test automation) and talked about all the interesting stuff that is in there? Sure there’s documentation for all those messages, but I could take a more “Here’s what I think” approach and be less formal than the documentation. I’ll try to focus on the messages that are unique to z/OS, but won’t avoid messages that just happen to show up on all platforms if I think they are interesting to z/OS folks.
As it turned out, I also just went through the list of possible messages you can get looking for some good stuff that didn’t happen to be in the one log I grabbed. While I was at it, I realized there are a lot more ‘error’ messages than there are ‘interesting’ messages. I decided not to cover all the error messages. If you get one of those, look it up and, if that doesn’t help, open a support case. I don’t want to turn my blog series into a debug guide. If I get something wrong I’ll cause more problems than I solve.
So I’m going to focus on those messages where we’re trying to tell you something, but not pointing out a problem. We’ll see if that turns out to be a useful criteria or not.
I fully expect that blog posts that focus on a single message, or even a small group of messages, won’t turn out to be very long. There’s only so much you can say, after all. Hopefully it will still be interesting to whoever is reading these (assuming anybody is…..”Bueller? Bueller?”)