This post is a running capture of Q&A from the WebSphere MQ Admin seminar in Amsterdam, brought to you by WebSphere Insights and Nastel.
Welcome to Amsterdam and thanks for attending! I will continue to update it throughout the week rather than posting once per day, so feel free to bookmark the page and refresh from time to time. Please also feel free to contact me directly and I’ll either help you out or find someone who can. Looking for photos? On to the Q&A…
Q: You mentioned “sack uber flow” or something like that.
A: Sorry for the accent. That was supposed to be “Stack Overflow.” Look up old WebSphere MQ questions here, or enter your own. If you have an account there, remember to accept answers to your posts when you get a good one, and upvote high quality answers to any questions.
Q: We have an exit on z/OS that takes the value from MCAUSER and puts it into the MQMD.MsgID. Is that available on UNIX systems?
A: You are in luck! Please see Secure Messaging Scenarios with WebSphere MQ. Jørgen Pedersen wrote that exit as part of the Redbooks residency that produced this book.
Q: What if my WebSphere MQ administrator disables my AMS security policies, does some nefarious stuff, then changes them back?
A: Yes, it is true that the MQ Admin has the ability to do many nasty things on the QMgr. If an application accepts commands by listening to a queue, the MQ admin is effectively an administrator of that application. Except where AMS is involved and the QMgr is V7.5. As of V7.5, the queue manager will not let the administrator GET or PUT messages on the policy queue using the message API. If configuration events are enabled, use of the policy management commands or WebSphere MQ Explorer to edit or delete the policies results in event messages. As AJ noted in class, converting event queues to topics prevents the administrator from intercepting the publications.
Webcast on WebSphere MQ for z/OS Debugging Abends for Beginners – 11 December, 2012 at 11am EST, 4pm UTC. Register here.
Q: What is this “RFE Community” of which you speak?
A: The Request For Enhancement Community is where you can submit your requirements for IBM products, including the WebSphere MQ family. Unlike the previous system, the RFE submissions are public and you can vote and comment on the ones you like, or enter your own. Because the new system is public, there is much more transparency as to what features are most or least in demand.
Already in the first day we’ve run into a few things that are good candidates for an RFE. Several people mentioned that the Infocenter reorganization makes it hard to find things such as the content that used to be in the Quick Beginnings manuals. Someone else mentioned Windows Power Shell was not supported in more recent MQ versions. If there is an RFE for the feature you want, vote on it. If not, submit a new one.
Q: Where are the communities mentioned in the session?
A: MQSeries.net is easy to find – go to http://mqseries.net. If you prefer a list server, just send an email with the words “subscribe mqseries” in the body to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.MEDUNIWIEN.AC.AT or use the web interface. The list server is hosted by the University of Vienna and has been in operation since the earliest days of WebSphere MQ. Accordingly, it is known in the community as “the Vienna MQSeries list.”
Q: Glen mentioned the Quick Beginnings Guides but I can’t find them in the Infocenter.
A: As of v7.1, these were broken up into 9 sections and redistributed to the topics that contain similar information. For each of the platforms there’s an index page with links to the 9 sections where the content was relocated. If you enter “Quick Beginnings” into the Infocenter search box, it pulls up these pages.
Q: I need to increase the size of my MQ error logs. Where are the error log file sizes specified?
A: This answer grew too long so I moved it to its own post.
