RE: Running batch jobs in Qinter

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jim

Not to pick on you specifically but the problem with this approach and
similar strategies is that you have effectively ceded control of the
performance and management of your system to users who will not "play nicely".

Under your scenario it is perfectly possible for two mutually exclusive
jobs to run at the same time (presuming such beasts exist on your system).
I would suggest that when this happens your management will not thank you
for allowing users to submit extra jobs but will instead ask you why you
compromised the integrity of the system.

On a production system users should not have the ability to manage jobs.
Period.

In those cases where people have the additional authority they should be
instructed not to use it on pain of losing that authority. (For instance on
systems where CHGJOB has been interwoven into the system by thoughtless
programmers and where people have access to WRKJOBQ to see the status of jobs.)

In the earlier example about people queueing up jobs and then releasing
them as needed and taking advantage of the lower job number (was this on a
system using JDE ? :)) the answer is to report and explain it to the
affected group of users and let peer pressure take its course.

Since managing job queues and performance go hand in hand in any job where
I am responsible for performance I insist on being able to manage the job
queues or not be held accountable for performance issues. In 20 years I
have not had a manager that could reasonably decline this particular
request without having to substantially change my job description.

Since all managers want someone to blame about performance I have always
ended up controlling the job queues and treated jobs being moved by users
as a security violation.

The answer therefore is security and management. Where possible enforce
your requirements, otherwise get management backing of the policy and
advertise which users actively disadvantage their buddies.

The "bad" users in this case are nearly always programmers. They should
know better :)

regards
Evan Harris

> since the miscreant users are submitting their jobs to the QINTER job
> queue:
>
> a) remove the jobq entry for QINTER job queue from QINTER subsystem
> b) add a job queue entry for QINTER jobq to the QBATCH subsystem
>
> that will foil most users.