I attended the "Share" Conference in Anaheim, California during the first week of March, 2000.  This conference is a chance for me to get away from the office for a few days and learn some things about the world of IBM mainframes.

Contents of this section:

But first, a little about the outside world -- the trip from Palmdale to Anaheim. . .

The trip started in the late winter darkness.  A little breakfast to get going.

It snowed in the mountains this weekend.  One of the mountains I need to cross to get from Palmdale to Anaheim is the Escondido Summit, elevation 3258 feet.

Below, look at the view from my car on that Monday morning 3/6/2000.  There was ice on the road, so progress was slow.

Click any one of these pictures to see a bigger view.

The I-5 "Santa Ana" freeway is all torn up and full of heavy traffic because of the construction that's been going on for the past year or so.  This is a picture of one of the many construction sites.  Here are some more.
Along the way, the following sites are visible:

A store to get paint ball supplies.
Knotts Berry Farm.  This is the Ghostrider -- a huge wooden roller coaster.
And the Movieland Wax Museum.
The conference is held
at the Hilton
and the Marriott

Here's a tribute to Disney's 100 Dalmatians, sitting outside the Hilton.
Here's how the Hilton looks inside.  Two escalators flanking a decorative fountain take guests to the meeting rooms upstairs.

A stairway leads downstairs to the Cafe Express

The Cafe Express is a great place to get a salad, sandwich and soda or coffee.  But get there before the last morning session ends, or you'll be waiting an hour for food.

Here are some of the people who attended Share:


David, the Windows NT guy

 "Thanks for the invite/pass to attend the Share Conference in Anaheim last week.  It was worth the trip for me in that I had a chance to see and work with Windows 2000 Active Directory setup and administration. The sessions that I attended were hands-on lab environment where we performed an upgrade of a Window NT 4.0 Server to a Windows 2000, where the server was a Primary Domain Controller (PDC).

"The room was adequately sized for the number of attendees, and there was an available lab server for everyone to utilize. The presenter was a Microsoft product manager, he seemed very knowledgeable, and kept the pace very quick, so there was no wasted time. The large number of sessions with so many people milling around took some getting used to, but largely the organization seemed to be pretty good.

All things considered, the sessions were better than I anticipated."


Boris, the CICS guy

 "The SHARE conference in Anaheim was one of the best I have ever attended. At the conference I tried to get more information about the Web related offerings of IBM. As a result of this conference I would like to share with you two issues:
  1. "MQS seems very useful for our company and easy to do.

    For our company with its diverse information processing platforms the usage of MQS might prove very beneficial.
  2. "S/390 Application Development Solution is a new offering from IBM.

    IBM is offering a low end Multiprise OS/390 systems, loaded with ALL IBM software on it (pre-installed and tuned). The system supports by default 10 users. The hardware is discounted up to 80% and the software is free."


Craig, former MVS guy for our company.


Noemi, Data Security guru


Rick, former Network guru for our company, and currently with Attachmate, a vendor at the Technology Exchange.


Sandye, manager of mainframe systems engineering.

 "There were several sessions that provided useful and timely information.  Here's my 'Trip Report'. 


Teresa, MVS wizard.

Ted's SHARE 2000 Trip Report

Here is the summary of the highlights from some of the Share sessions that I attended last week.  Click here for my full report.

Introduction to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) gave me an overview of what EAI is, why we need it, and the forms it can take.

Java for OS/390 provided IBM's direction for S/390 Java, and gave some helpful hints on implementing Java apps on S/390.

OS/390 Security Server RACF Update - I learned about t he digital certificate support in RACF, enhancements provided with OS/390 2.8, and how to use them.

Big Changes coming to Software Licensing -  Interesting presentation about the problem with software licensing costs for the S/390 platform and the XSLM solution to this problem.

OS/390 R8 User Experience - The installation process / problems / gotcha's that one user experienced when installing OS/390 2.8

LDAP Implementation and Customization -  I learned about LDAP on S/390, the 2 flavors - DB2 and RACF, and how they are implemented.

OS/390 UNIX System Services & DGW Security Diagnostics gave me a list of places I can look for diagnostics for S/390 UNIX (FSUM), HTTP Webserver (IMW),

Storage Subsystem Division Networking Segment Strategy for 2000 described the IBM / CISCO agreement for selling of networking equipment and the IBM strategy for e-business connectivity - Emulated I/O over PCI cards was not a listed strategy.

Using UNIX System Services - A user experience - Several customer examples of S/390 UNIX apps, the most interesting was a SAR server based on the CA-View product with the http server. It allows access to production reports over the Internet.

OS/390 R7 R8 and R9 goody bag - Review of some little enhancements in new releases that solve or help with OS/390 support issues.

Bit Bucket X'13' was similar to above session, but not limited to new releases - reviews some little known tools for techsupport use.
The "Technology Exchange" was held at the Marriott.  There, vendors of IBM mainframe products set up booths to promote their products.
By Wednesday, the time had come to dismantle the Technology Exchange.  Here are some of the spare parts destined for the storage room.


Driving home on the 14 Freeway.


Driving home on the 14 Freeway


"Lake Palmdale" at dusk


Palmdale City Lights